Best Practice Guidance
Human Interaction with Technology in Dementia

Recommendations

3.1

Practical, cognitive & social factors to improve usability of technology for people with dementia

Technologies are increasingly vital in today’s activities in homes and communities. Nevertheless, little attention has been given to the consequences of the increasing complexity and reliance on them, for example, at home, in shops, traffic situations, meaningful activities and health care services. The users’ ability to manage products and services has been largely neglected or taken for granted. People with dementia often do not use the available technology because it does not match their needs and capacities. This section provides recommendations to improve the usability of technology used in daily life, for meaningful activities, in healthcare and in the context of promoting the Social Health of people with dementia.
3.1.1
Technology in everyday life
3.1.1.3

Consider undesired side effects of dementia prevention technologies and discourses

Guidance

Public health policy should more fully consider the undesired side effects of dementia prevention technologies and discourses which may reinforce the fear of dementia and imply a moral responsibility on people who cannot maintain cognition in later life due to the progression of the condition.

Explanation and Examples

A review of the literature shows there is little evidence for the effectiveness of brain training to prevent dementia. Furthermore, ethnographic research has generated evidence that engagement with it can act as a form of social exclusion by separating older people into those who have ‘successfully cognitively aged’ and those who have not. Indeed, the promotion of this technology implies an individual responsibility to stay cognitively healthy, implicitly reinforcing anxiety and blame around the condition and people who live with it. These side effects can reinforce the exclusion of people with the condition.

Themes

Target groups

Type of evidence

Sébastien Libert (INDUCT ESR2)

Literature review, Ethnography

References

Libert, S., Charlesworth, G., & Higgs, P. (n.d.). Cognitive decline and distinction: A new line of fracture in later life? Ageing and Society, 40(12), 2574-2592. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X19000734