The MOONRISE project, a collaboration between ki:e and Scottish Brain Sciences, aims to improve the assessment of social communication abilities in individuals at the prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease.

By leveraging advanced automated speech and conversation analysis tools, this project will focus on identifying early signs of decline in social communication abilities, which can be critical for early intervention and improving patient outcomes. Social communication is a key factor in daily interactions, contributing to mental well-being and maintaining social connections, yet it is often under assessed in clinical settings. This project aspires to establish novel endpoints that could be used in clinical trials, offering a robust objective measure of social communication abilities.

The central objective of the MOONRISE project is to develop core measures of social communication that can act as early indicators of Alzheimer’s disease. This will be achieved through the collection and analysis of conversational data, using metrics such as vocabulary richness and syntactic complexity. These speech and interaction features will be mapped onto standard measures of social communication abilities, enabling the definition of key markers that can represent different stages of social communication decline.

Data Collection: 100 participants will be recruited from the ongoing IONA longitudinal cohort in Scotland. 

Start Date: November 2024

Expected Outcomes

Identification of specific markers of social communication decline that are correlated with early Alzheimer’s, which could become essential tools for early diagnosis.

Development of novel endpoints for clinical trials, allowing for a more precise assessment of therapeutic interventions’ impact on social communication abilities.