Digital technologies and Alzheimer’s from the perspective of formal caregivers using an action- research methodology

• Autor(a) principal: Vaz, Cátia
• Data de Publicação: 2024
• Outros Autores: Novais, Célia, Gonçalves, Bruno F., Rocha, Alberto, Forte, Pedro, Carvalho, Helena M., Gonçalves, Vitor
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/29609
• topic: Alzheimer’s dementia; Formal caregivers; Digital technologies

Alzheimer’s dementia leads to a progressive decline in individual’s cognitive ability with interference in daily living activities. Applying cognitive stimulation in the early stages is an added value in delaying cognitive decline. In this process, the use of digital technologies may contribute to avoiding, in a first phase, the use of drugs and delaying the institutionalization of Alzheimer’s patients. Thus, the general objective was conducted to identify their perceptions on the use of new digital technologies in the cognitive stimulation of Alzheimer’s patients with formal caregivers. To this end, an action-research methodology was applied to survey the state-of-the-art on the digital technologies and Alzheimer’s from the perspective of formal caregivers. Sixty-two formal caregivers participated in this research, of whom 74.2% are female and the remaining (25.8%) are male. Regarding working with digital technologies with Alzheimer’s dementia patients, a large percentage of respondents (73.6%) answered that they only use them sometimes, and 26.4% said they never use them. These results suggest that there is still resistance or lack of confidence in the use of digital technologies by formal caregivers working with Alzheimer’s dementia patients. The results show that all the respondents can identify signs of Alzheimer’s dementia in the patients. Consequently, this is understandable, even though they had never received specific training in this area, especially the cognitive stimulation.