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Project
Project Type - Pilot Projects

Neureka Latin America: a Scalable Digital Tool to Assess Brain Health

Creating a digital path to measure cognitive health
Latin America & Caribbean

Overview

The significant increase in the aging population across Latin America raises the need to develop scalable tools to assess brain health. Advanced age is a top risk factor for the development of brain pathologies like dementia. However, brain health issues are also strongly influenced by modifiable factors that co-occur with disadvantages in the social determinants of health. While early, systematic, and culturally appropriate screening of individuals at risk is crucial for delivering tailored interventions, significant barriers hinder such efforts across Latin America. The assessment of brain health typically relies on resource-intensive, in-person neurocognitive testing, inaccessible for underserved populations residing outside major cities. Furthermore, traditional neurocognitive tests lack sensitivity to detect subtle cognitive changes. Lastly, our understanding of the region-specific impacts of modifiable risk factors on brain health remains limited. Digital tools such as smartphone apps can help to overcome these issues by providing self-administered neurocognitive assessments capable of reaching wider and more diverse sectors of the population at low-cost. By enabling frequent and ecological assessments, smartphone apps have the potential to yield more sensitive estimations of an individual's cognitive function. However, these tools have been developed in high-income countries and its validity in developing, highly unequal regions remains to be established. 

Project Details

To fill this gap, this project aims to develop a scalable digital tool to assess brain health in Latin America. We will translate into Spanish and adapt the smartphone app ‘Neureka’ which includes gamified neurocognitive tests and questionnaires of risk factors for brain health. After a pilot study (N=40) to assess the psychometric properties of the tool, its acceptability and external validity will be evaluated using a well-characterized sample of 100 healthy adults (40 - 80 years) taking part in the ReDLat consortium sites of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Finally, the app will be deployed in the app store of said countries to acquire data from 1,000 citizen scientists and examine region-specific associations between modifiable risk factors and cognition in comparison with high-income countries using machine learning regression models. This project will deliver an acceptable, valid, and sensitive tool to assess brain health and cognitive risk in older adults from Latin America.