Memory for unique personal experiences (episodic memory) is critical to daily life functioning. This form of long-term memory also displays the largest degree of age-related decline. This condition is accelerated in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which is often the precursor for emerging Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Since AD produces tremendous chronic burdens on individuals, families and health care systems around the world, the development of effective therapeutic interventions to prevent or delay AD is an urgent international priority. Noninvasive brain stimulation with transcranial direct current (tDCS) has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing long-term memory in healthy human subjects. In addition, reactivation of consolidated memories triggers reconsolidation, a time-limited period during which existing memories can be strengthened. Recent reconsolidation studies in healthy young and older adults have shown that noninvasive stimulation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) significantly strengthens existing verbal episodic memories. In this double-blind, placebo-controlled study, I test the hypothesis that facilitatory tDCS over the PFC will strengthen existing verbal memories through reconsolidation in individuals with aMCI. In addition, I will determine specific biomarkers to help identify individuals who benefit the most from this tDCS intervention based on variations in brain structure or presence of genetic polymorphisms. These data will provide preliminary information that is crucial for the design of multicentre, longitudinal, placebo-controlled clinical trials, which are needed to validate this novel experimental intervention. This fellowship will provide me with the training in neurorehabilitation, the possibility to learn new skills (neuroimaging and genetics) through secondments, and the opportunity to build the interdisciplinary collaborations I need to become an independent and successful scientist in the field of neuroplasticity.

The main contribution of PROCareLife consists in proposing an integrated scalable and interactive care ecosystem, which can be easily adapted to the reality of several chronic diseases, care institutions and end-user requirements, benefiting all the involved actors, from patients, to caregivers and health professionals. Its main contributions consist of: (a) building an integrated scalable and interactive care ecosystem for neurodegenerative diseases and adaptable to other chronic conditions; (b) finding the best actions/measures from a medical and social point of view that can facilitate an improved quality of life, awareness and care management for senior users suffering of neurodegenerative and/or other chronic diseases; (c) provide a personalized recommendation and interaction model, which can support the user through gamification techniques to adopt healthy habits, maintain a good daily routine and follow the prescribed actions by the professionals for maintaining and improving their health condition; (d) enable multi-disciplinary communication between all involved stakeholders, better time management for social and health professionals and contribute to achieving a cost-efficient, flexible and high adaptable solution for senior users suffering of short or long term conditions.

One out of six people in the European Union has a disability, usually caused by an acute episode or a chronic disease. Providing a suitable rehabilitation is the main issue for people as they age as it helps people to live independently and enhance their Quality of Life. However, as the rehabilitation period usually last some months, the continuity of care often is interrupted in the transition from the hospital to the home. Virtual Coaches can help these patients to proceed with a personalized rehabilitation that complies to age-related conditions, as the key technology for empowering patients through the enhancement of the adherence to the care plan and the risk prevention. The project “vCare” (Virtual Coaching Activities for Rehabilitation in Elderly) addresses two major shortcomings of the status quo: a participatory design driven by users’ needs and the personalization of the care pathways enabled by technology. In fact that rehabilitation is an ideal setting as “users” (physicians and patients) interact together for a “long” period into the clinic (from two weeks to two months): this is a good opportunity to embed into the knowledge of the system the clinical profiles and the pathways that will drive the behaviour of the virtual coach at home. Well-elaborated services for tele-rehabilitation of former EU projects, such as eWall or Miracolus Life, will be adapted. Therefore, the system will integrate a semantic layer (universAAL) including a reasoning engine that merges all patient-related and context information together. The advanced services of vCare will be deployed on a reference platform of MYSPHERA (FIWARE-based) and implemented in four reference sites, dealing with commonly impacted domains (neurological and cardiological). The results of vCare shall stimulate the European Healthcare & ICT sector for innovations in the field of integrated care. In sum, vCare will contribute to the EU goal to increase healthy life years of Europeans by two until 2020.