– AMADEO

In recent years, large European and NIH funding schemes have sought to promote international, multidisciplinary, public-private collaborative efforts to advance the development and application of digital health technologies (DHTs) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and ageing. However, to our knowledge, to date there has been no coordinated effort to support knowledge transfer on DHT research between these different spaces despite them sharing many commonalities in terms of needs, challenges and barriers. The goal of the proposed working group is to enable a focused exchange of perspectives between multi-disciplinary DHT experts from across AD, PD and ageing, alongside experts from the field of health technology assessment, as well as patient advocates, to address the following objectives:
1) Co-develop a framework for how to select a DHT for use in a clinical care pathway or a clinical trial;
2) Co-identify implementation challenges, solutions and opportunities to support EU healthcare delivery organisations in the integration of DHTs;
3) Collect insights, requests, concerns and priorities from all stakeholders to be used as a decision support tool by regulators on the widespread use of DHTs. The position statement, which will touch upon direct-to-patient marketing and access, will help inform regulatory frameworks and ensure robust systems are in place to prevent the exploitation of people with AD, PD and older adults in their self-care.
It is hoped that collective insights from these fields will help provide clear guidance to support efforts by the clinical, research and ultimately patient communities to 1) appropriately, that is usefully and safely, transfer DHTs from research into the clinical setting and 2) refine and define novel digital endpoints for clinical trials.