COGS — digital Cognitive Stimulation Therapy

What COGS is

COGS is a digital Cognitive Stimulation Therapy app, co-designed with Memory Matters (Plymouth) and completed in 2023 under Innovate UK’s Healthy Ageing Programme. It is sibling research to MCDC — produced by the same UCA team (Brill, Whalley, and Memory Matters) — and addresses a different but adjacent problem: access to NICE-recommended CST.

CST is the only psychosocial intervention recommended by NICE for mild-to-moderate dementia (NG97, 2018). But three implementation barriers restrict who can actually receive it: facilitators are required to complete a two-day training course; sessions are delivered in groups of 5–8 participants; and the format assumes an in-person setting. For people unable to attend group sessions — because of geography, mobility, caregiver availability, or preference for care at home — NICE’s recommendation has historically been unreachable in practice.

COGS narrows the gap by digitising the full 14-session CST programme. It removes the two-day training requirement, removes the group-setting requirement, and enables individual delivery in people’s own homes. An estimated 200+ family and professional carers across England have used COGS to deliver evidence-based cognitive stimulation since its completion in 2023.

How it relates to MCDC

COGS is a companion, not a component. MCDC’s Component 1 — M-CST — is music-based cognitive stimulation, structurally distinct from standard CST. COGS digitises standard CST without music. The two share a team (Whalley and Brill at UCA) and a clinical partner (Memory Matters), but they answer different questions: M-CST asks whether a music-primary CST derivative produces different and additional effects; COGS asks how to remove the practical barriers to existing CST for people who would otherwise go without.

Read together, they describe a practice strategy: make canonical CST available at home (COGS), and develop a music-based CST derivative under clinical test (M-CST) that exploits the preserved-musical-memory neuroscience the standard CST protocol under-uses.

Availability

COGS is online and publicly available — anyone who wants to deliver CST to someone at home can download it. That is the point of the project: NICE-recommended CST without the training-course and group-setting barriers that previously gated access.

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Evidence and reach

• Co-design partner: Memory Matters (Plymouth) — dementia-support charity and CST specialists, CEO Kate Smith.
• Funder: Innovate UK Healthy Ageing Programme. Final project report filed 2023.
• Reach to date: approximately 200+ family and professional carers across England.
• Status: publicly available since 2023. Peer-reviewed evaluation is pending; evidence to date is the Innovate UK final project report.

Open questions for Harry

• Canonical download URL (web / Apple App Store / Google Play)
• Access terms — free, subscription, institutionally licensed?
• Named grant reference for the Innovate UK Healthy Ageing award
• Any usage data beyond the 200+ carers figure worth surfacing (sessions run, geographic distribution, user testimonials)