Personalized tablets for residents in long-term care to support recreation and mitigate isolation

Objectives: There is a digital divide in long-term care homes (LTCH), with few residents having regular access to devices with internet access. In this study, we provided long-term care residents with personalized and adapted tablets. We aimed to understand what factors influenced tablet use and the impact of tablet access on opportunities for social connection and recreation.
Design: A pragmatic, mixed methods observational study with assessment of outcomes at baseline and three months.
Setting and Participants: A total of 58 resident-care partner dyads were recruited across seven LTCH in Ontario, Canada. The main inclusion criterion was having a care partner willing to participate, and we excluded residents who already had an internet-connected device.
Methods: Resident demographics, functional status assessments, and pre/post outcomes were captured from the RAI-MDS. Care partners completed questionnaires and site leads assessed resident quality of life before and approximately three months after tablet distribution. Interviews with 23 care partners and 7 residents post-implementation were analyzed.
Results: Across all participants, tablets were used 44.5 ± 86.1 minutes per day on average, with a subset of 25 high users engaging with the tablet 96.9 ± 110.6 minutes per day on average. Predictors of higher tablet use were younger age, higher cognitive functioning, absence of hearing impairment, and having a care partner who lives further away. There was no improvement on quantitative measures of quality of life, recreation or relational closeness. In interviews, residents and care partners identified many different opportunities afforded by access to personalized tablets.