JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Caregivers supporting individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) frequently encounter prolonged emotional strain, psychological distress, and social isolation. Yet, their needs are overlooked mainly in current technological and clinical interventions. The special routines and obligations of Alzheimer's caregivers are frequently not well-suited to the many AI-driven mental health solutions that are currently available. This reveals a critical need for sophisticated, customized solutions created especially to help the mental health of caregivers for Alzheimer's patients.

Objective:

To address the existing limitations of personalized mental health interventions, we aimed to identify existing literature on personalized mental health interventions using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for specific purposes and to develop a new framework for the caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.

Methods:

We followed an iterative approach to design the new framework. Firstly, we did a systematic literature review of current literature to identify data analysis, AI methods, and personalized interventions. Secondly, we focused on the underlying gaps of this research, and by synthesizing our findings from the review, we proposed a conceptual framework.

Results:

The systematic literature review identified 73 unique results, and we found three unique potential papers from external sources. Of these, 28 papers were eligible for inclusion, on which we performed our analysis. Based on the findings, we developed a new conceptual framework with three special features specifically for caregivers of patients with AD/ADRD. The three unique features are a personalized daily routine scheduler, which will take both the Patient with AD/ADRD and the caregiver’s information to make it personalized, a daily reward system to keep patients motivated, and an educational repository to get bite-sized knowledge for the lesson of handling patients efficiently and taking care of one’s mental health.

Conclusions:

The conceptual framework aims to address the unique challenges faced by caregivers, including stress, burnout, and emotional strain. By building on insights from recent mental health interventions, it seeks to improve existing approaches through more personalized and evidence-informed support.