Best Practice Guidance
Human Interaction with Technology in Dementia

themes: Mental health

Evaluating the effectiveness of specific contemporary technology

The rapid growth of the technological landscape and related new services have the potential to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of health and social services and facilitate social participation and engagement in activities. But which technology is effective and how is this evaluated best? This section provides recommendations to evaluate the effectiveness of technology in daily life, meaningful activities and healthcare services as well as of technologies aimed to promote the Social Health of people with dementia. Examples of useful technologies in some of these areas are provided.
Health care technologies

Call for research on online training programs for carers’ mechanisms of change to increase the quality of online training for families of people with dementia

Guidance

Evaluations of the effectiveness of internet training programs should explore mechanisms of change and aspects of the intervention design, such as reliability, the type of device used and modality of the intervention.

Explanation and example

The systematic review (Egan et al 2018) of internet training support for familiy carers lacks detail about potential factors which may influence the effectiveness of online programs (i.e. type of connectivity, development of the intervention, usability, etc.). The quality of individual studies selected for the systematic review was limited as more than 50% of the studies showed incomplete data reporting, and 25% showed a selective reporting of outcomes according to the risk of bias assessment performed making the generalization of the results difficult. However, the systematic review reported improvements on carer’s mental health outcomes by internet training.

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Call for research on moderators of online training programs for carers’ of people with dementia

Guidance

Analyses of the moderation effect of demographic characteristic of the carers and other characteristics of the person with dementia on the internet training programs outcomes should be encouraged.

Explanation and example

Several studies have been done to find moderators of effects of online training programs for carers of people with dementia. Some studies have demonstrated that some programs were more effective for certain subgroups of carers. However, in our analyses we could not replicate these findings. Our analyses on the effect of age, gender, level of education, relationship with the person with dementia, functional status of the person with dementia and frequency of appearance of challenging behaviour suggests that the program is equally effective for all the subgroups analysed. More research is needed before we have definitive answers. A better understanding of moderators of carers’ training programs could lead to better tailoring of programs based on the specific characteristic of the carer.

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