Technology Enhanced Health and Social Care for Vulnerable People During the COVID-19 Outbreak

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide with critical consequences in health, as well as in social, economic, and particularly in psychological conditions of vulnerable people, especially older adults. Therefore, it is necessary the direct attention to their health care needs and related interventions. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have direct impact on older adults' health and quality of life leading to decreased depression and loneliness, along with empowerment of independent life. Many studies involve cognitive training programs/software based on new technological systems that provide to vulnerable people access to gamified, attractive, cognitive exercises for overall functionality everywhere and at any time. Twenty-four participants (mean age 69.3 years) were assigned to this study. The cognitive training component of LLM Care was used as an interactive software to enhance participants' cognitive functions. The intervention lasted 12 weeks with the frequency of 2-4 times per week in sessions of at least 30 min. Participants used their personal devices (tablets/laptops) in their own residence, while technical and consulting guidance was provided by LLM Care certified trainers. They were informed about the purpose of the study, while consent forms along with psychological assessments were distributed every 2 weeks to periodically evaluate their psychosocial and mental health conditions. The assessments included the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5), the Short Anxiety Screening Test (SAST), the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the Impact Factor Event Scale (IES-R). According to the results, the participants with improved well-being tended to report decreased subjective distress caused by COVID-19, and their engagement with new technologies can potentially minimize the negative outcomes occurred by the current stressful situation, mitigating the effect of hyperarousal symptoms, while increasing their overall well-being. Well-being seems to remain relatively stable among older adults and decreases only when adversities occur, while the usability of the software was perceived as marginally acceptable by participants. The exploitation of the LLM Care contributes to the improvement of older adults' well-being and alleviates the negative experience caused by stressful situations like COVID-19.

Functional Re-organization of Cortical Networks of Senior Citizens After a 24-Week Traditional Dance Program

Neuroscience is developing rapidly by providing a variety of modern tools for analyzing the functional interactions of the brain and detection of pathological deviations due to neurodegeneration. The present study argues that the induction of neuroplasticity of the mature human brain leads to the prevention of dementia. Promising solution seems to be the dance programs because they combine cognitive and physical activity in a pleasant way. So, we investigated whether the traditional Greek dances can improve the cognitive, physical and functional status of the elderly always aiming at promoting active and healthy aging. Forty-four participants were randomly assigned equally to the training group and an active control group. The duration of the program was 6 months. Also, the participants were evaluated for their physical status and through an electroencephalographic (EEG) examination at rest (eyes-closed condition). The EEG testing was performed 1–14 days before (pre) and after (post) the training. Cortical network analysis was applied by modeling the cortex through a generic anatomical model of 20,000 fixed dipoles. These were grouped into 512 cortical regions of interest (ROIs). High quality, artifact-free data resulting from an elaborate pre-processing pipeline were segmented into multiple, 30 s of continuous epochs. Then, functional connectivity among those ROIs was performed for each epoch through the relative wavelet entropy (RWE). Synchronization matrices were computed and then thresholded in order to provide binary, directed cortical networks of various density ranges. The results showed that the dance training improved optimal network performance as estimated by the small-world property. Further analysis demonstrated that there were also local network changes resulting in better information flow and functional re-organization of the network nodes. These results indicate the application of the dance training as a possible non-pharmacological intervention for promoting mental and physical well-being of senior citizens. Our results were also compared with a combination of computerized cognitive and physical training, which has already been demonstrated to induce neuroplasticity (LLM Care).