INSIGHT project - communicating risk

How do we empower people to reduce their own dementia risk? To answer this we would like to investigate whether providing participants with their own personal risk information (including cognitive tests and blood based biomarkers) could lead to large scale positive behaviour change.

INSIGHT project - communicating risk

INSIGHT: Co-designing an interactive online dashboard to communicate biological and digital markers of dementia risk 

We know 40% of dementia cases could be prevented through modification of behavioral and lifestyle factors. Yet we still don’t know how to effectively promote positive behaviour change in the community. So the question remains: how do we empower people to reduce their own dementia risk?

Recent research has shown how providing people with personalised information leads to a more effective change in behaviour than general information. This indicates that we could enact large-scale positive behaviour change in the Tasmanian community, by simply providing participants with their own personal risk information. In dementia research, for example in ISLAND, we collect a lot of information on dementia risk, whether through cognitive tests or blood-based biomarkers. This project aims to communicate this information to participants, alongside personalised recommendations, and test whether this has a positive effect on long-term behaviours.

The first step in this project will be to co-design how we communicate these results. We will engage a diverse group of individuals, including Dementia Advocates, GPs and neuropsychologists to help design an interactive online dashboard. The second step will be to test whether this personalised information has a positive impact on behaviour. Step three will compare the effectiveness of providing personal vs general information in ISLAND.

We hope to show how providing personalised information and lifestyle recommendations will positively impact behaviour change and reduce dementia risk. We anticipate this research will be greatly relevant to researchers and research participants across Australia, and we will promote this widely through various media and open-access publications.