Supporting Caregivers in Nursing Homes for Alzheimer’s Disease Patients: A Technological Approach to Overnight Supervision

The reduction of public expenditure and investments in health care provisioning calls for new, sustainable models to transform the increasing aging population and dementia-related diseases incidence from global challenges into new opportunities. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies play a vital role, to both promote aging in place and home management of Patients with Dementia, and to provide new tools and solutions to facilitate the working conditions of the care staff in nursing homes, which remain an essential facility when cognitive-impaired patients cannot live at home anymore. Night staff in nursing homes are a vulnerable group, receiving less supervision and support than day staff, but with high levels of responsibility. Additionally, nighttime attendance of patients affected by dementia may be difficult, because of their incremented neuropsychiatric symptoms. This paper describes an integrated system for the night monitoring of patients with dementia in nursing homes, based on a product originally conceived for domestic use, but re-designed to provide support to nurses, by means of a set of sensors located in each patient’s room, and suitable software applications to detect dangerous events and raise automatic alerts delivered to the nurses through mobile devices. The results obtained from the first experimental installation of the monitoring system proved the effectiveness of the proposed solution to support nurses during the night supervision of patients, and suggested suitable modifications and additional features to increase the nurses’ compliance.