Wearable sensors for monitoring caregivers of people with dementia: a scoping review

Caregivers of people with dementia often face a demanding care burden that may lead to adverse physical and psychological outcomes. Wearable sensors are becoming a valuable tool for preventive care. We aimed to provide the first systematic map of the published evidence on the use of wearable sensors to monitor caregivers of people with dementia.

We developed a scoping review protocol following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The searches were conducted on PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycInfo, and IEEE.

We identified 1394 articles and selected 37 reports. Sleep measures were the outcome most frequently evaluated (28/37). Among these reports, eight assessed the effectiveness of different interventions targeting both caregivers and care-receivers and found no improvement in caregivers’ sleep; three compared the sleep of caregivers of people with dementia with controls, with conflicting results; five focused on depressive symptoms; and four associated these symptoms with shorter sleep duration and greater sleep fragmentation and sleep latency. A single device was used in 33 reports and sensors were most commonly placed at the wrist (33/37). Most studies monitored caregivers for 1 or more weeks (27/37).

Wearable sensors were mainly used to monitor sleep in informal caregivers of people with dementia based on wrist accelerometry for 1 or more weeks, with conflicting results. There is a need for targeted studies with adequate control groups to identify factors associated with sleep alterations in informal and formal caregivers of people with dementia, leveraging multi-sensor setups with the inclusion of autonomic nervous system metrics.