In the nineties, numerous studies began to highlight the problem of the increasing number of people with Alzheimer’s disease in developed countries, especially in the context of demographic progress. At the same time, the 21st century is typical of the development of advanced technologies that penetrate all areas of human life. Digital devices, sensors, and intelligent applications are tools that can help seniors and allow better communication and control of their caregivers. The aim of the paper is to provide an up-to-date summary of the use of technological solutions for improving health and safety for people with Alzheimer’s disease. Firstly, the problems and needs of senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and their caregivers are specified. Secondly, a scoping review is performed regarding the technological solutions suggested to assist this specific group of patients. Works obtained from the following libraries are used in this scoping review: Web of Science, PubMed, Springer, ACM and IEEE Xplore. Four independent reviewers screened the identified records and selected relevant articles which were published in the period from 2007 to 2018. A total of 6,705 publications were selected. In all, 128 full papers were screened. Results obtained from the relevant studies were furthermore divided into the following categories according to the type and use of technologies: devices, processing, and activity recognition. The leading technological solution in the category of devices are wearables and ambient non-invasive sensors. The introduction and utilization of these technologies, however, bring about challenges in acceptability, durability, ease of use, communication, and power requirements. Furthermore, it needs to be pointed out that these technological solutions should be based on open standards.
By improving the quality of life and extending the length of life, Western society is becoming an increasingly ageing population with a higher proportion of seniors. From another point of view, there is a critical shortage of care staff, both in hospitals and for in-home care. Thanks to new technology trends such as Smart Homes and Smart Furniture, there is an opportunity for increased support for seniors by utilizing new technologies. This paper presents the current trends and possibilities in applying smart information and communications technology (ICT) solutions for in-home care concerning diseases in old age. The paper consists of a systematic review according to the PRISMA methodology of the available literature in Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Springer, and the Espacenet patent database. Publications report the usage of some types of artificial intelligence and their implementation and non-intrusive sensing technologies. The patents review identified solutions with a focus on monitoring the state of older adults and mobility improvement. Existing ICT smart solutions must address the following issues: (1) ease-of-use; (2) invisibility and disuse that isolate older adults; (3) privacy and security; (4) affordability of technology in terms of cost; and (5) supporting elderly individuals to stay in their homes or move in different environments independently. There is a significant gap between a large number of scientific publications and commercial solutions. The existing products reflect the specifics of the diseases in a rather wider context instead of the fulfilment of exact needs. It is often stated that such devices can be used across diseases, but the direct connection and benefits for the disease is still rather weak. The challenge remains to tap the existing potential of a large number of innovative ideas on the market and improve the quality of life.
With the increasing number of scientific publications, the analysis of the trends and the state-of-the-art in a certain scientific field is becoming very time-consuming and tedious task. In response to urgent needs of information, for which the existing systematic review model does not well, several other review types have emerged, namely the rapid review and scoping reviews. In this paper, we propose an NLP powered tool that automates most of the review process by automatic analysis of articles indexed in the IEEE Xplore, PubMed, and Springer digital libraries. We demonstrate the applicability of the toolkit by analyzing articles related to Enhanced Living Environments and Ambient Assisted Living, in accordance with the PRISMA surveying methodology. The relevant articles were processed by the NLP toolkit to identify articles that contain up to 20 properties clustered into 4 logical groups. The analysis showed increasing attention from the scientific communities towards Enhanced and Assisted living environments over the last 10 years and showed several trends in the specific research topics that fall into this scope. The case study demonstrates that the NLP toolkit can ease and speed up the review process and show valuable insights from the surveyed articles even without manually reading of most of the articles. Moreover, it pinpoints the most relevant articles which contain more properties and therefore, significantly reduces the manual work, while also generating informative tables, charts and graphs.
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