AI for Aging societies: From Basic Concepts to Practical Tools for AI-Facilitated Cognitive Training – AI-cog

Worldwide, people are living longer than ever before in history. Today, most people can expect to live into their sixties and beyond. Ageing societies, however, bring social, economical, and healthcare challenges. Japan (#1), France (#3) and Germany (#4) belong to the top five countries worldwide with the highest economic old-age dependency ratio of people aged over 65 years and more. Particularly detrimental health conditions in older age include depression, and dementia. Today, around 50 M people globally suffer from dementia and there are nearly 10 M new cases every year. According to WHO there is a new case of dementia every 3 seconds globally.
Mastering the challenges associated with aging societies in general, and those associated with age-related brain disorders in particular, is therefore of outstanding global importance, and especially for the three countries involved in the present trilateral call, Japan, France, and Germany.

Therefore, the aim of the present project is to leverage the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to foster healthy aging. To this aim we will study objective machine-learning-driven biomarkers to evaluate cognitive interventions as well as support personalized therapies. We will develop novel, dedicated machine learning (ML) methods and adapt them to the special signal types that can be recorded from the human brain. We will make our methods publicly available in an open-source reference software package, focussing on unsupervised learning, data augmentation, domain adaptation, and interpretable machine learning models. Our main scientific aims is to optimize the decodable information about the current functional state of the brain, to identify biomarkers of the risk for cognitive impairments and different forms of dementia, and use these improved methods to guide AI-facilitated cognitive training.

These joint efforts between Japan, France and Germany will be accompanied by a focus on ethical and societal aspects of AI in the context of aging, paired with participatory, transnational outreach activities, to foster the dialog between our scientific community and the general public.