Design, development, and usability evaluation of a dashboard for supporting formal caregivers in managing people with dementia

Dementia is a condition that affects more and more elderly people around the world. The number of people affected by dementia is expected to increase in the future due to increasing longevity and the growing elderly population. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of people with dementia worldwide is expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050. This will pose a significant challenge to the health and social systems of many nations and will require increased attention and resources for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of dementia. As the disease spreads, the workload of formal caregivers will inevitably increase. The HAAL project (HeAlthy Aging eco-system for peopLe with dementia) responds to this challenge by developing a dashboard that integrates all the relevant information coming from a set or a subset of nine already experimented devices. The dashboard is designed to show the most relevant information regarding the patient (fall events, sleep data, wellbeing data) to the formal caregiver. The purpose of this paper is therefore to present the experimental results obtained from the usability test performed on the HAAL dashboard by 26 formal caregivers in three pilot sites: Italy, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. Quantitative and qualitative results of this preliminary study confirm the suitability of the dashboard, highlighting inter-country differences.