# A MULTIFACETED DIGITAL HEALTH PLATFORM TO ADVANCE ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE PATIENT MONITORING, SAFETY, CARE, AND RESEARCH.

> **NIH NIH R43** · AMISSA, INC. · 2021 · $495,787

## Abstract

Project Summary
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementias (ADRD) are projected to affect 50 million Americans by
2050. In 2019, more than 16 million Americans struggled while providing unpaid care for people with AD/ADRD
and they need stigma-free solutions to help remotely monitor challenging AD/ADRD behaviors like falling and
wandering. Separate but related, many AD/ADRD clinical trials are siloed and require patient volunteers and
their caregivers to travel to in-person appointments. This is burdensome for families, increases the cost to
conduct studies, and data collected is often non-representative of daily life. Amissa Inc. has developed a stigma-
free, prototype solution to significantly advance AD/ADRD patient monitoring, safety, and caregiving while
simultaneously aggregating high-frequency digital biomarkers to advance medical research. Several competitors
have developed hardware devices for tracking elderly individuals who wander and/or fall however, AD/ADRD
patients express feelings of stress, anxiety, humiliation, burden, and stigma associated with dementia when
wearing these “special” devices. AD/ADRD caregivers seek “socially-acceptable” devices that improve health
and location monitoring, provide peace of mind, reduce worry, improve patient safety and quality of life without
loved ones feeling shame or embarrassment. Amissa’s prototype software application, created for widely
available, consumer-grade smartwatches, enables families to remotely monitor when loved ones fall inside or
outside the home and help prevent dangerous wandering episodes. Our initial software application also sends
emergency push notifications to key stakeholders when loved ones exhibit uncommon behaviors (e.g. sudden
change in variable heart rate). This Phase I SBIR proposal is designed to develop a platform which passively
and unobtrusively collects time-based behavioral and biometric data from AD/ADRD patient smartwatches in
real-life settings to improve caregiving while also establishing a high-frequency cloud database where one does
not currently exist for AD/ADRD research. Aim 1 will develop a caregiver-designed AD/ADRD patient monitoring
application for off-the-shelf consumer smartwatches and conduct user-experience and user-interface testing to
facilitate feedback for iterative product design improvement. Utilizing opt-in user data from Amissa’s caregiver
monitoring application, Aim 2 will establish a novel high-frequency behavioral and biometric cloud database to
advance AD/ADRD digital biomarker research capabilities to predict patient falls an wandering. Amissa’s project
intends to enable faster collection of multimodal data via broader demographic populations to advance AD/ADRD
medical research. This Phase I SBIR has the potential for high impact by providing a single, low-cost, digital
technology solution to improve AD/ADRD patient care and safety while reducing stress for caregivers and
families. Furthermore, this research will improve c...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10325493
- **Project number:** 1R43AG072981-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** AMISSA, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Jon Andrew Corkey
- **Activity code:** R43 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $495,787
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-01 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10325493

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10325493, A MULTIFACETED DIGITAL HEALTH PLATFORM TO ADVANCE ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE PATIENT MONITORING, SAFETY, CARE, AND RESEARCH. (1R43AG072981-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10325493. Licensed CC0.

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