Programming for dementia

Severin Skillman develops software applications and systems to help dementia patients.

My name is Severin and I'm an engineer on a mission to help people with dementia.

One project that I'm particularly proud of is the UK Dementia Research Institute Research Project. This project has just started and we want to try to improve the quality of life for people living with dementia in their own home and to delay the disease progression.

We're trying to bring the latest technologies into people's homes, so that we can intervene with any problems that are arising, or, you know, that might be a sign of something occurring in the future.

So we will monitor their activity in their house, their vital signs. We gather information by inserting sensors throughout the home of the person with dementia and we develop machine learning and analytical algorithms to analyse all the data that we collect from the home, and it provides a sort of higher-level insight into this data.

So the idea is if we can reduce the amount of times people have to go to hospital and reduce the amount of times that they have to get medical attention, we can slow down the decline of their condition.

I'm very passionate about my job and the work I'm doing, so it's definitely a very fulfilling career to go into.

I'm very happy to be able to make an impact in people's lives, to really help people with dementia and their caregivers and potentially to save lives.