A systematic mapping study on assitive technologies for people with dementia

This paper presents a systematic mapping study based on literature and industrial survey related to assistive technologies for people with dementia. The world population of the ageing people is increasing both in developed and developing countries, so does the number of people with dementia. Consequently assistive technologies are getting much importance from academic researchers and industry as an aid for people with dementia. Assistive technologies are helping people with dementia to perform activities which otherwise are not possible for them without external help. Systematic mapping studies are popular in other fields like software engineering, yet this methodology is mostly ignored in assistive technology research. Literature survey indicates that there is no systematic mapping study conducted so far on assistive technologies for people with dementia. Thus, we are motivated to conduct this systematic mapping study on assistive technologies for people with dementia. As per the study nature, we carried out a thorough literature and industrial survey. The results indicates that current available assistive technologies can be classified into five major types i.e. robotics, health monitoring, prompts and reminders, communication and software. There is rich literature available on first three categories while communication and software based assistive technologies need more attention, whereas the industrial focus is mostly on health monitoring and software based assistive technologies. The mapping study results emphasize the need for industry to invest more efforts in communication and software based assistive technologies.