Technology-based assistance of people with dementia: state of the art, open challenges, and future developments
The impact of dementia and other cognitive diseases on the capability of making everyday life activities is well-known, as well as it has been demonstrated that dementia may strongly affect not only the life of the person affected, but also the surrounding relatives. In fact, in the majority of the cases, the caregiver of a person with dementia is a family member, who usually loses the possibility to run a normal life, because of the burden of assistance. As a consequence, a number of research projects have been carried out, under the umbrella of different funding schemes, to identify the right technologies able to support caregivers of people with dementia, both informal and formal ones. This chapter provides first a review of the research and market state of the art of assistive technologies for dementia. Then, from this analysis, the requirements, barriers and success factors of the different solutions are identified and discussed. Two projects are presented in detail, to cover the domain of technologies for informal caregivers, applied at home where the patient with dementia lives; and to show how similar technologies, in a different architectural arrangement and with the provision of different services and functionalities, may be used in nursing homes and care institutions. Conclusions regarding the current stage of development and open issues are finally presented in the last section.
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