Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Nov 12, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 11, 2020 - Jan 6, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 4, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Digital Platform for Facilitating Personalized Dementia Care in Nursing Homes: A Formative Evaluation Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Care personalization is key to the wellbeing of People with Dementia (PwD) according to person-centered care. With the development of Internet of Things, a large quantity of personal data can be collected securely and reliably, which has the potential to facilitate care personalization for PwD. Yet, there are limited assistive technologies developed for this purpose, and the user acceptance for assistive technologies is low in nursing homes. Therefore, through a Data-enabled Design approach, a digital platform was developed for helping the care team in a nursing home to personalize dementia care, specifically on the management of Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia.
Objective:
This study aims to evaluate the digital platform in a real-life context with potential users from two aspects: 1) to explore if the data visualizations of the digital platform could help with generating insights on the current state of each PwD participant and 2) to gather the feedback on the digital platform from the care team.
Methods:
The digital platform was deployed in the nursing home for seven weeks, and the data collected were visualized and presented to the care team via the digital platform. The visualizations were analyzed by the researchers for pattern detection. Meanwhile, the care team were asked to analyze the visualizations and were interviewed on 1) if any insights and actions are generated from the analysis; 2) the usefulness of the digital platform and 3) what improvements they would like to see.
Results:
The data collected in the digital platform demonstrated its potential for pattern detection. Insights were generated by the care team and categorized into “client level”, “ward level” and “team level”. The according actions taken by the care team were classified into “investigation” and “implementation”. The user acceptance varied across the care team, and three aspects of improvements for the digital platform were identified.
Conclusions:
Via evaluating the digital platform, this study gained insights on applying Data-enabled Design in personalizing dementia care; besides, it offers future researchers some recommendations on how to integrate assistive technologies in the nursing home context.
Citation
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