yes / Background: With the expected increase in the numbers of persons with dementia, providing timely, adequate, and affordable
care and support is challenging. Assistive and health technologies may be a valuable contribution in dementia care, but new
challenges may emerge.
Objective: The aim of our study was to review the state of the art of technologies for persons with dementia regarding issues
on development, usability, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, deployment, and ethics in 3 fields of application of technologies:
(1) support with managing everyday life, (2) support with participating in pleasurable and meaningful activities, and (3) support
with dementia health and social care provision. The study also aimed to identify gaps in the evidence and challenges for future
research.
Methods: Reviews of literature and expert opinions were used in our study. Literature searches were conducted on usability,
effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and ethics using PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases with no time limit.
Selection criteria in our selected technology fields were reviews in English for community-dwelling persons with dementia.
Regarding deployment issues, searches were done in Health Technology Assessment databases.
Results: According to our results, persons with dementia want to be included in the development of technologies; there is little
research on the usability of assistive technologies; various benefits are reported but are mainly based on low-quality studies;
barriers to deployment of technologies in dementia care were identified, and ethical issues were raised by researchers but often
not studied. Many challenges remain such as including the target group more often in development, performing more high-quality
studies on usability and effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, creating and having access to high-quality datasets on existing
technologies to enable adequate deployment of technologies in dementia care, and ensuring that ethical issues are considered an
important topic for researchers to include in their evaluation of assistive technologies.
Conclusions: Based on these findings, various actions are recommended for development, usability, effectiveness and
cost-effectiveness, deployment, and ethics of assistive and health technologies across Europe. These include avoiding replication
of technology development that is unhelpful or ineffective and focusing on how technologies succeed in addressing individual
needs of persons with dementia. Furthermore, it is suggested to include these recommendations in national and international calls
for funding and assistive technology research programs. Finally, practitioners, policy makers, care insurers, and care providers
should work together with technology enterprises and researchers to prepare strategies for the implementation of assistive
technologies in different care settings. This may help future generations of persons with dementia to utilize available and affordable
technologies and, ultimately, to benefit from them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/11364 |
| Date | 09 January 2017 |
| Creators | Meiland, F., Innes, A., Mountain, Gail, Robinson, L., Van der Roest, H., García-Casal, A., Gove, Dianne M., Thyrian, J.R., Evans, S., Dröes, R., Kelly, F., Kurz, A., Casey, D., Szcześniak, D., Dening, T., Craven, M.P., Span, M., Felzmann, H., Tsolaki, M., Franco-Martin, M. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2017 JMIR Publications. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://rehab.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included. |
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