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If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Frailty is characterized by an age-related decline in multiple physiological systems, leading to a high vulnerability to stressors, adverse health outcomes, and low quality of life.
Neuroscientific models of pathological aging emphasize the loss of sensorimotor stimulation and reduced neuromodulatory capacities as core processes in age-related cognitive and bodily decline, which may be associated with maladaptive plastic changes in the brain.
We plan to increase sensorimotor stimulation in frail persons through a newly developed app-based training program and link the training trials to biological and psychological correlates of age-associated vulnerability and health indices. The sensorimotor training includes unimodal and multimodal sensory discrimination tasks in the visual, auditory, and tactile domain, as well as sensorimotor precision tasks.
The tasks will be implemented using an adaptive training algorithm and enriched with motivational components embedded in a virtual training environment. We expect a pre-post reduction of frailty status and associated functional decline related to refinement of representational maps within the sensorimotor system and improved sensorimotor function such as extremity function. Secondary analyses will study the influence of BDNF genotype as moderating variable. Additional outcomes will include measures of perceptual and cognitive functioning, quality of life as well as BDNF serum levels.
