Research Projects

Joint Action on Dementia 2015-2018. The Joint Action will focus on two phases on work: approximately 12 months on developing a consensus on the best evidence of effective action in 4 key areas (diagnosis and post-diagnostic support; crisis and care coordination; quality of care in residential care settings; and dementia-friendly communities); and...

The long-term goal of this project is to understand how neuronal assemblies exchange information (functional or neuronal communication), and how variability in neuronal communication explains variability in behavioural performance, both in the intact and injured brain. Communication involves temporal interactions between neuronal assemblies either...

Across Europe there is an increasing shift from centralized intramural care to decentralized extramural care, with a major role and responsibility for care organisations to provide care in the community and tools to support independent living. In the MagicTABLE project we want to bring the intramural serious game system, the ‘Tovertafel’, to the...

Throughout evolution, the human genome has been attacked by retrotransposons, parasitic DNA elements that spread through our genome by a copy-paste activity. I previously showed that SVA elements, the youngest class of retrotransposons in our genome, harbour a strong gene-regulatory potential which is normally repressed by KRAB zinc finger protein...

Mobility or physical movement contributes to health and well-being in later life and is a key issue in gerontological research. Most studies have focused on the contribution of outdoor mobility to active ageing, but physical and cognitive impairments restrict the mobility of many older adults. MeaningfulMobility will take a more comprehensive...

MedGUIDE is a European innovation project that provides an innovative approach to support seniors with dementia with their medication adherence through smart pill boxes and social networking. The project aims to help elders with mild cognitive impairments living at home

Research on dementia discourse has shown how our attitudes, views and words have a positive or negative influence on the well-being of People Living With Dementia (PLWD). In 2013, Alzheimer Europe’s report underlined worrying ethical risks of metaphor use in dementia narratives, including stigmatisation, stereotyping and social exclusion. Yet we...

Memories are important for dementia patients; they influence how they act and feel nowadays. However, for people around them, it is often hard to explore what is really going on in their beloved one’s mind. In MI-Tale we develop a digital and interactive game to recall and record memories. This tool contains existing material such as historical...

Vascular dementia and heart failure represent major health burden to morbidity, mortality and quality of life. Comorbidities (hypertension, aging, diabetes, etc.) affect all organs, but the brain and heart are especially sensitive to these chronic stresses resulting in cognitive impairment (a mental disorder) and heart failure (a non-mental...

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a major hallmark of various neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s diseases or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). However linking mitochondrial dysfunction to the pathogenesis of some of these diseases still needs to be elucidated. Furthermore, in pathologies where...

The aim of CONFIDENCE is to develop a community-based mobility safeguarding assistance service for people suffering from mild to moderate dementia. CONFIDENCE combines “assistive technologies” with “personal help”. The CONFIDENCE service is built around a “virtual companion” providing different levels of assistance, depending on the situational...

Dementia researchers are increasingly focusing their efforts on finding ways to prevent the onset of dementia symptoms in the first place, and for this they need to work with people who are still in the very earliest stages of the disease. The MOPEAD project aims to identify and test different models for engaging with this important group and...