Toward Personalizing Alzheimer's Disease Therapy Using an Intelligent Cognitive Control System

Abstract

Subjective cognitive decline is an early state of Alzheimer’s Disease which affects almost 10 million people every year. It results from negative emotions such as frustration which are more present than healthy adults. For this reason, our work focuses on relaxing subjective cognitive decline patients using virtual reality environments to improve their memory performance. We proposed in our previous work a neurofeedback approach which adapts the virtual environment to each patient according to their emotions using a Neural Agent. We found that the Neural Agent can adapt the environment to each participant but have limitations. This work is a continuation of our approach in which we propose a Limbic Agent able to monitor the interactions between the Neural Agent and patients’ emotional reactions, learn from these interactions, and modify the Neural Agent in order to enhance the adaptation to each patient with an Intelligent Cognitive Control System. Our goal is to create a system able to support the Limbic System which is the main area in charge of controlling emotions and creating memory in the human brain. We used data collected form our previous work to train the Limbic Agent and results showed that the agent is capable of modifying the weight of existing rules, generating new intervention rules, and predicting if they will work or not.