A smartphone application to evaluate technology adoption and usage in persons with dementia.

Abstract

Dementia affects a proportionally large number of the older population, presenting a set of symptoms that cause cognitive decline and negatively affect quality of life. Technology offers an assistive role for some of these symptoms, specifically in addressing forgetfulness. Current works have explored the benefits of reminding technology, which whilst useful is only effective for those who adopt the technology. Therefore it is of merit to establish the individual parameters that characterize an adopter and non-adopter, to better target future interventions and their deployment. To aid the collection of this data a smartphone app was developed for persons with dementia. It has been designed as both a reminder application to help those with dementia accommodate their forgetfulness and a data collection tool to log usage and compliance with reminders. The app has been evaluated by a pre-pilot cohort (n=9) and was found to have a mean reminder acknowledgement of 73.09%.