Mission Possible: The role of challenge prizes in a revitalised UK Innovation Strategy
Assisted Cognition Prize A £10m prize awarded to the inventor of an AI tool that helps people with dementia live at home for longer by learning from and compensating for their condition as it progresses, helping them remember, understand and navigate everyday tasks Why a prize? The Assisted Cognition Prize would stimulate teams to research and develop smart assistant devices (like Siri and Alexa) but adapt these to the unique and changing needs of people affected by dementia, people currently underserved by this type of service. Alongside the final
Technology leadership for the UK The prize would support and strengthen UK leadership in digital products and services, including artificial intelligence and data science, where UK firms and universities are strong.
cash prize, awarded to the team whose solution helps users stay in their own homes longest (as demonstrated in a consumer trial), teams will be provided with information on existing datasets to help train their algorithms and support with testing and co-design – to ensure that solutions meet the highest technical and ethical standards.
Alignment with the seven technology families of UK strength and opportunity Advanced Materials and Manufacturing AI, Digital and Advanced Computing Bioinformatics and Genomics Engineering Biology Electronics, Photonics and Quantum Energy and Environment Technologies Robotics and Smart Machines
The problem 850,000 Britons are diagnosed with dementia every year and, with our ageing population, this burden is expected to double. Treatments that prevent or arrest disease progression are still years away. Yet improved assistive technology could help preserve quality of life, maintain independence and help people with dementia live in their own homes for longer.
The impact The Assisted Cognition Prize would focus on demonstrated impact of solutions that prove they can
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help people live independently at home for longer. Our analysis suggests that the key elements to solving this challenge are in building the complex algorithms that can track and adapt to users’ changing condition over time, so that they remain useful and usable and learn from their preferences and habits; and in the design of interfaces and functionalities which are useful and easy to use for people with cognitive impairments.
The mission The Assisted Cognition Prize could be part of an innovation mission to reverse the growth in adult social care spending by 2030.