Assistive technology for independent living with dementia: Stylized facts and research gaps

Abstract Background Recent advancement in assistive technologies (AT) have fueled the debate on new, IT-reliant ways of providing cure and care of dementia. Still the impact on practice has been little. With this paper, we want to find out to which extent current studies have discussed the impacts of AT for dementia. Methods We conduct a scoping review of the literature on impacts of AT usage in the context of dementia. We search disciplinary (ACM, EMBASE, PsycInfo) as well as cross-disciplinary databases (EBSCO, Web of Science). Based on the identified relevant papers, we extract a list of original statements, which we aggregate to stylized facts. The method of stylized facts is a common research method to derive knowledge in the form of generalized and simplified statements describing interesting characteristics and relationships concerning empirically observable phenomena. Results We identify n=539 unique articles, out of which n=36 report impacts of AT usage in the context of dementia. We aggregate 6 stylized facts that describe common findings. Furthermore, we identify research gaps in this domain. There is little known about the suitable design of social systems around assistive technologies. Conclusions While the identified stylized facts indicate how much evidence there is behind certain common statements in the reviewed literature, we additionally find that studies in the area of AT for dementia often neglect the socio-economic and ethical dimension. These are important research gaps for future work.