Professor Dennis Chan on predicting Alzheimer’s disease with augmented reality

Dementia is the leading cause of death in the UK and something which one in three of us will experience in our lifetime. There are many types of dementia, but Alzheimer’s disease is the most common.

If detected early, people living with Alzheimer’s disease can get the right support and treatment they need and make plans for their future. However, a third of people living with dementia over 65 in England do not get a diagnosis.

Professor Dennis Chan (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) and his colleagues Dr Andrea Castegnaro and Professor Neil Burgess are working on a way to diagnose Alzheimer’s years before a patient presents with symptoms. He and his team are funded by a grant from the NIHR and have already developed a way to use virtual reality (VR) to assess a person’s spatial awareness, the decline of which is an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease.

The team are now working on developing an augmented reality (AR) test so that the technology can one day be used in a clinical setting, like a GP surgery.