Using a wearable wrist device to better understand the behavior of dementia patients
What is it about?
We hoped that monitoring skin conductance would help caregivers to anticipate an outburst of combative behavior. Although this hope was not realized, we did find a common response of the nervous system that occurred both in provoked and unprovoked outbursts.
Why is it important?
There may be a similar response in patients that have what are called "psychogenic non-epileptic seizures," which are spells that appear to be seizures but are not accompanied by seizure activity as detected by electroencephalography (EEG). If confirmed, this would suggest that there are nervous system responses that are common to conditions that seem unrelated (dementia and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures) and would create a framework for connecting these apparently different conditions.