Software based assistive technologies for people with dementia: Current achievements and future trends

The growth in dementia population poses an imperative need of developing new technologies for the wellbeing of the people with dementia. This paper presents empirical results for the 51 software based assistive technologies (SWAT) for the people with dementia from literature and commercially available SWAT. Although software technology usage is not a new field but the usage of software technologies have been very low in dementia care. It has great potential to help the people with dementia, but a lot of research still needed to be done. The software and assistive technology concepts follow almost similar definitions; therefore their combination can yield better results for helping the people with dementia. We investigate what SWAT exists for the people with dementia and what type of functions usually such technologies perform. The SWAT can particularly restore the confidence of the people with dementia by providing them cognitive, reminders, health monitoring, socialization, leisure, travel, dementia detection and prevention help etc. This paper also highlights five future research areas which still need extensive research efforts