Caring4Dementia: a mobile application to train people caring for patients with dementia

Dementia is a term used when the brain functionality reduces in terms of behaviour, memory and thinking clearly for daily activities. In the early stages, memory impairment limits the memory processes in patients with dementia (PwD). In advanced stages, it affects the PwD's autonomy when performing complex daily activities such as PwD's interaction and communication with people around them. Dementia is becoming one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide. It affects the ability of an individual to reason with and to understand others, which creates difficulties in communication between the family caregivers and PwDs. Thus, there is a need for a platform to help family caregivers to communicate with the PwDs efficiently. One of the helpful tools to work with is a mobile application (app). Mobile apps can be widely available and easy to use for the people caring for PwDs. This paper describes the development of a mobile app for people interacting with PwDs. The app contains different scenarios related to daily activities that are usually performed by PwDs. Each scenario includes a set of options for the users and asks them to choose the option in response to the corresponding daily activity. Having chosen the option, the app provides the user with comments which are already included in the app for each scenario. The comments were developed by the research team in partnership with clinicians having more than 5 years of experience with PwDs. Caring4Dementia app can address the communication problem by providing (1) specific knowledge about the PwD's condition, cognitive performance evaluation, and monitoring, and (2) educating on appropriate behaviour to adopt while facing communication challenges associated with dementia. The theoretical framework of a communication training app introduced in the present paper will direct the future empirical investigations where the effectiveness of the app will be compared to the effectiveness of currently existing methods.