Dementia and moderate cognitive impairment are some of the most common challenges faced by older citizens. Kwido Mementia has become a result of the twinning cooperation between Ideable Solutions, Spain (twinning originator) and the Ana Aslan International Foundation, Romania (twinning adopter) working on an innovative digital solution to the problem.
The DigitalHealthEurope (DHE) twinning Kwido Mementia represents software designed for cognitive stimulation and training for adults over 65 years of age, based on the combination of cognitive training and games through new technologies such as a dedicated app and virtual reality. The solution is to be implemented in patients who attend daycare centres on daily basis, followed by therapies at home. In particular, Kwido Mementia focuses on strengthening peoples’ attention, calculation, executive functions, language, memory and orientation skills.
Kwido Mementia is a solution that has already shown clinical benefits and encouraging results in terms of adoption by older people in Spain. The goal of the twinning project was to allow the Ana Aslan International Foundation the full acquisition of the solution at a reasonable scale and, therefore, to broaden the usage of modern, user-friendly and cost-effective tools for preventing impairment and dementia in the elderly. The project aims to reach more than 25,000 citizens in three years after the twinning implementation.
To successfully implement the twinning, both teams started with the localisation of the content in Romanian. This was followed by the training of the seniors with the support of the healthcare professionals participating in this project and through the easy deployment of the cognitive stimulation programs at home.
As part of the offline activities, beyond the initial translations and adaptations for the Romanian language, efforts were also directed towards promoting the twinning initiative among the respective stakeholder groups (seniors and municipal service providers for seniors) to collect all the relevant opinions on the solution.
In April and May 2021, the partners ran the first test of the software on a group of seniors aged 60+ and collected qualitative feedback on the performance of the platform and their degree of satisfaction.
Thus, the twinning project enabled full transfer, adaptation and deployment of a fully functional Romanian version of Kwido Mementia. As a result, a significant exchange of good practices has been achieved, both partners becoming aware of the increasing level of regulating requirements in terms of ethical and data privacy aspects and of medical device regulations that are to be applied when developing solutions for senior citizens.
As for the future plans of the partners, it is planned now to obtain the EU certification for Kwido Mementia and to reach a large number of seniors through partnerships with the Seniors’ Clubs and Centres from Bucharest. As of November 2021, the Ana Aslan International Foundation has already signed an agreement with the Seniors Centre of the Bucharest Municipality which has more than 60,000 seniors in their network to promote it to the seniors once it becomes available.