AI-Powered Smart Glasses Launched to Assist Dementia Patients

A new AI-powered large language model (LLM) to assist dementia and Alzheimer’s patients in their daily lives has been launched by CareYaya Health Technologies. 

The technology, called MedaCareLLM, integrates with smart glasses using video data and facial and object recognition to offer “life-changing” real-time assistance, said the company. 

As patients wear the smart glasses, the AI can identify familiar faces, that recognition is then converted into a “prompt” for that specific person, delivered directly into the wearer’s ear through a bone-conduction earphone or hearing aid. 

This can support patients struggling with memory loss, confusion and embarrassment when recalling family members and friends, said CareYaya.

The glasses can also read medication pill bottles and remind patients when to take their next dose, as well as tell them dosage guidelines and important instructions such as whether to take medication with meals.

These features aim to prevent accidental duplicate doses, ease the burden on caregivers and improve the quality of life for individuals with dementia. 

In addition, by gathering video, audio and visual gaze data through smart glasses, CareYaya is developing advanced AI models that help recognize and track disease progression and daily diet patterns.

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Nearly 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's today and by 2050 this number is projected to rise to nearly 13 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Health and long-term care costs for people living with dementia are projected to reach $360 billion in 2024 and nearly $1 trillion in 2050, the association calculates. 

“We want to address the significant gap in dementia research, particularly with Black older adults, who are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s compared to White populations but are currently underrepresented in clinical trials and research studies,” said Neal K. Shah, CEO and co-founder of CareYaya Health Technologies, which is a LinkedIn Top 50 Startup.

“MedaCareLLM will aid us in our mission to level the playing field for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias research and eventually provide pharmaceutical companies with a more diverse dataset to advance Alzheimer’s treatment research,” Shah added. 

The company is backed by financing from the Johns Hopkins University Artificial Intelligence & Technology Collaboratory, the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP and the National Institutes of Health.

MedaCareLLM was developed as part of the OpenMind Project, an initiative by CareYaya to build a multimodal dataset of older adults' cognitive and neurological data. The company live-demonstrated the new product at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in October. 

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This article first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.