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Microsoft works with Leeds scientists on disease
LEEDS scientists have teamed up with computer giants Microsoft to work on technology that could help improve the quality of life for people with Alzheimer's disease.
Experts from Leeds University are working on a system which replicates artificial pictures that a healthy human brain captures and keeps as a memory.
Patients will then view the images to stimulate their brains and so enhance their ability to remember.
Early trials have shown patients to recall 80 per cent of their memory of an event after reviewing images for just two weeks.
The pictures are taken by a small camera, which patients wear. The kit takes a picture, of the patient's everyday life, every 30 seconds. The camera is later wired to a computer, and the thousands of pictures are run in front of the patient at high speed.
The technology is said to be so quick a whole day's events can be squeezed into a few minutes viewing time.
Microsoft, owned by Bill Gates, said to be the world's richest man, has backed the work with part of a grant of 250,000.
That money has enabled the university to devote a team of researchers, led by Professor Martin Conway and Dr Chris Moulin, to the job.
The academics' research department has a global reputation for work on the human memory.
Their team will use that expertise to work on improving the system, using information gathered from earlier trials run by Microsoft Research Cambridge and Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.
Those tests included data from a 63-year-old woman whose memory loss had been caused by a brain infection.
She used one of the cameras, known as a SenseCam, whenever she was expecting a significant event to happen in her life.
Before using the kit, the woman would forget everything within five days.
But while being tested her memory powers improved, where she was could recall 80 per cent of the event after just two weeks.
Dr Moulin, a neuropsychologist, said: "It's potentially very exciting. Having the camera could mean they can revisit not only the facts of events, but the essential feelings that are so much part of memory."
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Friday 25 May 2012
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