Cognitive Intervention Targeting Autobiographical Memory Impairment in Patients With Schizophrenia Using a Wearable Camera: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Abstract

Autobiographical memory (AM) impairment in schizophrenia affects the richness of detail in personal memories and is one of the major predictors of patients' social functioning. Despite the empirical evidence attributing these difficulties to a defective encoding process, cognitive remediation interventions targeting AM in schizophrenia often focus on the remote past, making it difficult to address the consequences of poor encoding. Our study evaluated the efficacy of an innovative approach using a wearable camera (NarrativeClip ®) in reinforcing the encoding of recent daily life events in patients with schizophrenia. Seventeen patients with schizophrenia and 15 control participants wore the camera during four consecutive days. Then, memories of events experienced during these days were reinforced using different types of retrospective, i.e. interventions designed to promote a re-encoding of the event. We evaluated two types of retrospective using the camera pictures: a simple visual retrospective and a visual retrospective associated with a specific event-cueing (VisR+EC). These two techniques were compared to a verbal retrospective and to the absence of retrospective. Our results showed that the VisR+EC allowed patients to retrieve as many details as the control group at a two-week interval. However, patients' memories remained impaired when a simple visual or a verbal retrospective was used. Our study provides encouraging results to foster the use of a wearable camera in individualized cognitive remediation programs for AM impairment in schizophrenia.

Unraveling the role of retrieval deficits in autobiographical memory impairment in schizophrenia: A comparison of involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories

“…For instance, teaching participants encoding strategies enhancing binding has been shown to reduce memory deficit in clinical populations by at encoding (Corrêa et al, 2015). The use of new technologies, such as wearable cameras (Allé et al, 2017;Silva et al, 2013), also have the potential to strengthen re-encoding of autobiographical events via exposure to the photographs taken by the device (Woodberry et al, 2015) and may therefore be especially useful for patients with schizophrenia (Dassing et al, 2020).…”

Lifelogging as a rehabilitation tool in patients with amnesia: A narrative literature review on the effect of lifelogging on memory loss

“…In all clinical studies enrolled in this review, lifelogging was found to have beneficial effects on the subjective and objective measurements of memory. All case studies on diverse brain-damaged samples (Berry et al, 2007(Berry et al, , 2009Brindley et al, 2011;Browne et al, 2011;Loveday & Conway, 2011;Pauly-Takacs et al, 2011;Svanberg & Evans, 2014), and also all group studies on patients with Alzheimer's dementia (Crete-Nishihata et al, 2012;Dassing et al, 2020;Woodberry et al, 2015) concluded that lifelogging is beneficial in rehabilitation of memory. In healthy samples, this finding was not always supported.…”

“…, used a bigger group of patients (51) and concluded that using Sensecam is more effective for memory rehabilitation compared to a number of other techniques. The clinical study by Dassing et al (2020) enrolled 17 patients diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and concomitant memory disorders as well 15 healthy controls. The researchers employed a Narrative Clip for their study and concluded that using the device can improve memory of amnesic patients.…”

“…Silva et al attributed the positive effect of Sensecam to the activation of brain regions which are responsible for autobiographical memory. Dassing et al (2020), for their study, enrolled 17 Schizophrenic patients and 15 healthy controls. All participants were asked to wear a Narrative clip for 4 days, at least 7 h per day.…”

“…One of the most frequently applied devices, is "Sensecam," which is one of the first lifelogging devices which has been used in scientific research (Dubourg et al, 2016;Doherty et al, 2011;Hodges et al, 2011). Two other wearable cameras that are mentioned in this review, are the "Autographer camera" (Selwood et al, 2020) and the "Narrative clip" (Dassing et al, 2020). These devices are small wearable cameras, which can be worn around the neck or on the clothing of a participant.…”