Using non-medical risk factors related to dementia and cognitive decline for developing an evidencebased e-health tool

Sammanfattning: The number of dementia cases is increasing worldwide. Most research and development in this area is related to the prevention of dementia, and to the development of various prediction tools for dementia. The tools made available take most of the medical data into account while calculating risk scores, with only a small amount of non-medical data. There is a lot of data related to medical and non-medical risk factors available from various sources which can be retrieved and analysed in real time, but this is today not used in any risk score tool for risk score calculation. As part of the project Multimodal strategies to promote a healthy brain in ageing: Innovative evidence-based tools (MULTI-MODE), a new risk score is being developed to be used in a new ICT-based tool for dementia prediction. Identification of non-medical data and a good model to fill the gap between data available at the server and using this data in risk score calculation may help in increasing the predictability of tools. In this thesis, some of the existing risk factors for the prediction of dementia are described, and the importance of non-medical factors in calculating risk scores is discussed. Additional non-medical factors are identified that could be included in future versions of the risk score. A database design for storing risk score information efficiently is presented, as is an app structure that can be used at the server side to validate the user input and to increase the effectiveness of a prediction tool.