LETHE: A Digital Intervention for Cognitive Decline.

Dementia is the main cause of disability in elderly populations. It has been shown that the risk factors of dementia are a mixture of pathological, lifestyle and heritable factors, with some of those being provably modifiable. Early diagnosis of dementia and approaches to slow down its evolution are currently the most prominent management methodologies due to lack of a cure. For that reason, a plethora of home-based assistive technologies for dementia management do exist, with most of them focusing on the improvement of memory and thinking. The main objective of LETHE is prevention in the whole spectrum of cognitive decline in the elderly population at risk reaching from asymptomatic to subjective or mild cognitive impairment to prodromal Dementia. LETHE will provide a Big Data collection platform and analysis system, that will allow prevention, personalized risk detection and intervention on cognitive decline. Through the subsequent 2-year clinical trial, the LETHE system, as well as the respective knowledge gained will be evaluated and validated. The scope of the current paper is to introduce the LETHE study and its respective novel platform as a holistic approach to multidomain lifestyle intervention trial studies. The present work depicts the architectural perspective and extends beyond state-of-the-art guidelines and approaches to health management systems and cloud platform development.Clinical Relevance - Patient Management Systems as well as lifestyle management platforms have significant clinical relevance as they allow for remote and continuous monitoring of patients' health status. LETHE aims to improve patient outcomes by providing predictive models for cognitive decline and patient adherence to the multimodal lifestyle intervention, enabling prompt and appropriate medical decisions.

Reconfiguring practice: the interdependence of experimental procedure and computing infrastructure in distributed earthquake engineering.

When transitioning local laboratory practices into distributed environments, the interdependent relationship between experimental procedure and the technologies used to execute experiments becomes highly visible and a focal point for system requirements. We present an analysis of ways in which this reciprocal relationship is reconfiguring laboratory practices in earthquake engineering as a new computing infrastructure is embedded within three laboratories in order to facilitate the execution of shared experiments across geographically distributed sites. The system has been developed as part of the UK Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation e-Research project, which links together three earthquake engineering laboratories at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford. We consider the ways in which researchers have successfully adapted their local laboratory practices through the modification of experimental procedure so that they may meet the challenges of coordinating distributed earthquake experiments.