As people age, frailty starts to creep in. Falls are more damaging and take longer to heal, muscles weaken, walking slows. And on top of physical frailty, people can also become “socially frail” as they age as connections to others fade away.

A new study, published in October in the Journal of Gerontology , finds that screening for social frailty might help doctors predict who will get dementia. The authors are now also working to see if an AI companion might help dementia sufferers by giving them an extra boost of social strength.

Physical frailty is easy to grasp, but social frailty is more complex. “Social frailty includes loneliness, but is broader than that,” says Suraj Samtani , a clinical psychologist at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at the University of New South Wa

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