The AD-RIDDLE project has reached an important milestone: the recruitment target for its pilot study on digital cognitive assessments (DCAs) has been successfully achieved. This achievement marks a key step forward in Work Package 2’s overall objective of conducting real-world testing of DCAs to improve early Alzheimer’s disease (AD) detection and better predict cognitive decline and dementia.
Remote DCAs have strong potential to provide more sensitive, scalable and accessible measures of cognitive decline compared to traditional in-clinic paper-and-pencil tests. However, further validation in real-world settings is still needed to support their widespread adoption.
The pilot study, conducted as part of Work Package 2, aims to evaluate the usability and feasibility of different DCAs along the clinical spectrum of AD. The study enrolled 150 participants across seven clinical sites in Europe (Sweden, Spain, Italy, Finland and the Netherlands), including people with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Participants were recruited through primary care, memory clinics and community-based cohorts. In this pilot study, participants undergo a baseline paper-and-pencil cognitive assessment in the clinic, followed by remote digital cognitive assessments at home, administered in random order with one-week intervals to avoid test interference. Data collection, which began in June 2025, is now nearing completion, with the pilot study moving towards data cleaning and analysis.
“Reaching the recruitment target is a major milestone for the project, reflecting the strong collaboration across clinical sites and the ongoing hard work put into recruitment at each site. The pilot study will offer valuable insights into how feasible and user-friendly these digital tools are for real-world data collection across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum”, said Laura Alvarez-Sanchez from Amsterdam UMC.
Building on this pilot, a large-scale longitudinal study is already underway to further validate these tools in real-world settings across Europe. Recruitment for this large-scale study has already started in three sites and additional sites have received ethics approval and are preparing agreements.
More information about the project can be found on the project’s website: https://ad-riddle.org/
