Dementia Empowerment with Heart Health Intervention and LLM-based Health AI Research Assistant

Abstract

Dementia is one of the most pressing health problems in the world. Still, the good news is that it is much better preventable than (advanced-stage) treatable. Over the years, a new narrative has come up: heart health = brain health. But its translation into healthcare interventions has been slow. In this design approach, we propose two empowerment options for patients, caregivers, and their health professionals. Firstly, we describe how cardiac health successes in enticing senior citizens to large lifestyle improvements may be used for treating early-stage dementia and cognitive decline. Biologically, this uses causality between blood pressure and cardiovascular health on the one hand and dementia outcomes on the other. Practically, it enables daily success feedback, which empowers patients in their health improvement experiments. Secondly, we describe and user-test an AI Health Research Assistant to extract the best available lifestyle findings from literature, to keep up with over 100,000 new health publications flooding us every year. Our user test highlights challenges and opportunities for a Health AI, especially regarding claim transparency, data quality, and risks of hallucinations. We suggest research metadata criteria to evaluate ambiguous or conflicting health science claims.