JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Assistive technologies for people with dementia and their family carers have the potential to ensure, improve and facilitate the dementia home care and thereby enhance the health of the people caring or being cared for. The number and variety of developed technologies and research continuously increased in the past decades. As a result, the research field became complex and unclear regarding the heterogeneous types of technologies, their areas of application or stages of development.

Objective:

The aim of this scoping review is to provide an overview of the research on technology-assisted home care for people with dementia and their relatives. It focusses on mapping the research field regarding the study design, study aim, setting of the intervention, sample size, technology type and technology aim.

Methods:

The scoping review was conducted following the framework by Levac et al. (2010). We searched in four scientific databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycInfo and CENTRAL) for studies on technologies that support people with dementia or their informal caregivers in the home care setting published between 2013 and 2018. The screening of articles was based on a priori defined eligibility criteria. We included qualitative and quantitative studies published in English or German and excluded studies that focused exclusively on people with mild cognitive impairment or delirium and on formal caregivers or health professionals.

Results:

From initially 5,328 records, the search led to 175 studies. We identified a variety of technology types including computer, tablet or laptop as well as robots, telephones, monitoring devices, Ambient Assisted Living, smartphones, television and gaming consoles. Assistive technologies are most commonly used by the people with dementia (44%), followed by the relatives (38.9%) and both target groups together (17.1%). They frequently aim to enable or improve care or therapy or to positively influence symptoms of people with dementia (e.g. disorientation). Research is most commonly conducted in form of case studies and series (41.1%) or Randomized Controlled Trials (25.1%) including mainly small sample sizes between 1 and 50 participants (69.7%). Whereas most of the studies analyze the effectiveness of an intervention (36.5%), others target the feasibility, usability, evaluation of technical components or they were more explorative.

Conclusions:

The review demonstrates the variety of technologies that exist in order to support people with dementia and their relatives in the home care. Whereas this variety provides the option for needs-oriented technical solutions that fit the individual care arrangements, it complicates the choice of the right application. Therefore, research on the users’ informational needs is required. Moreover, there is a need for larger studies of technologies’ effectiveness that could contribute to a higher acceptance and thus to a transition of technologies from research into the daily lives of people with dementia and their relatives.