Development and Preliminary Effects of Smart Cloth Care System for Persons with Dementia

For persons with dementia, changes in gait often lead to falls and unaccompanied wandering often leads to getting lost. Recently, a smart cloth care system has been developed by the School of Information Technology at Chang Gung University and was applied in an institution. However, it has not yet been applied in home settings to facilitate family caregiving for persons with dementia by preventing falls and getting lost and provide feedback for future caregiving. The purpose of this study is to develop and examine the preliminary effects of a smart cloth care system for facilitating family caregiving for persons with dementia in the home setting. This will be a three-year study, with the first two years using a mixed method to explore the feasibility of such a smart cloth care system and the third year using an experimental study to pilot test its effects. During this period, sensors need to be installed and family caregivers and home nurses will need to download an APP for receiving alarms when the care receiver is at risk for falling or getting lost. Home nurses will periodically provide feedback to the family caregivers regarding changes in activities and activity levels for future care plan. During the first two years, and in order to explore the accuracy and predictive ability of the care system, and user’s experiences, a concurrent parallel design combining qualitative and quantitative study approaches will be implemented. We plan to recruit 10 to 20 dyads of persons with dementia and their family caregivers. We will collect information regarding fall, time up & go, activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental ADLs, cognitive function and quality of life of the patient. We will also collect data on family caregiver’s preparedness, balance between competing needs, quality of life and depressive symptoms. We will examine the sensitivity and specificity and accuracy of the smart cloth care system and use qualitative data analysis strategies to explore the experiences of persons with dementia and their family caregivers (Miles and Huberman). Depending on the results of the first two years, this smart cloth care system will be modified and pilot tested in an experimental study during the third year. We plan to recruit at least 30 participants and randomize them into an intervention group (N=15) that receives the smart cloth care model and a control group (N=15) that receives usual care. Patient and caregiver outcomes will be followed every two months for a period of 6 months after the smart cloth care system has been implemented. Intention-to-treat and hierarchical linear models will be used to analyze the results. We hope to develop the smart cloth home care system with empirical evidence for persons with dementia.

Project ID:PC10901-0330
External Project ID:MOST107-2314-B182-007-MY3