Effects of rivastigmine on actigraphically monitored motor activity in severe agitation related to Alzheimer's disease: A placebo-controlled pilot study

Review of Information and Communication Technology Devices for Monitoring Functional and Cognitive Decline in Alzheimer′s Disease Clinical Trials

“…All RCTs we reviewed that used a technology-based measure of functional change were limited to the use of actigraphy. One study successfully used actigraphy to quantify motor agitation in a medication trial [28] as a pilot study while all the other studies used actigraphy measures to quantify rest-activity rhythm and sleep. Additional RCTs were identified that propose to use or are currently using an ICT device to capture longitudinal patient data without final results.…”

Measurement of Neuropsychiatric Symptoms in Clinical Trials Targeting Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders

“…In the field of AD, only several authors have proposed ambulatory actigraphy as an indirect assessment method for BPSD such as sleep disturbances, agitation, depression, and apathy. Actigraphy has been proposed to monitor specific BPSD in AD drug trials, such as sleep [53,54,55] and agitation [41,56], but, once again, has not been generalized to all drugs trials targeting these specific symptoms.…”

“…Because the devices are generally well-tolerated, data can be collected for multiple nights unlike polysomnography, the gold standard to evaluate sleep disturbances, that requires patient’s cooperation typically for overnight in-hospital stays (usually for one or at most two nights), takes considerable technician time to set up and score and is likely more disturbing for AD patients than less obstructive devices such as wrist-worn actigraphs. In Alzheimer’s disease, actigraphy has also been used in the evaluation of several BPSD such as agitation [39,40,41] or characterization of depression [42,43,44]. …”

A review of current information and communication technologies: can they be used to assess apathy?

“…Thus, more recent studies have shown that actigraphic locomotor activity assessment can be useful to evaluate NPS in dementia such as agitation (Nagels et al ., , Mahlberg et al ., ), depression (Volkers et al ., ), and apathy (David et al ., ). Recently, two studies with AD patients showed that the patients' obtained apathy scores on neuropsychiatric assessment scales correlate negatively with mean motor activity measured by the actigraph (David et al ., , ).…”