Dementia Caregivers’ Perspectives on Technology’s Place in Care Practices: Mixed Methods Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: As the number of individuals diagnosed with dementia continues to grow, collective caregiving capacity is simultaneously declining. As a result, caregivers often face significant stress and burnout, which negatively impacts both their well-being and the quality of care they are able to provide. To address these challenges, various forms of technology have been developed to support caregiving responsibilities for people with dementia. Barriers to widespread adoption include the cost of technology, lack of caregiver training, limited awareness of available solutions, privacy and ethical concerns, and resistance to change from both caregivers and care recipients. By identifying these key insights, this study seeks to inform the development of more accessible, user-friendly, and effective technological solutions that can better support caregivers in their vital roles. Objective: This study aimed to assess the way dementia caregivers solve common challenges, focusing on technology adoption and barriers to its use. Methods: We conducted online surveys regarding technology usage and caregiving experience, which were distributed to the communities of caregivers of people living with dementia. Surveys quantified categories of technology use and caregiver needs. The survey also gathered open responses for joys, struggles, and technology use. Follow-up interviews with caregivers discussed how specific challenges were met. The responses were thematically coded to characterize findings by the type-struggles, social supports, technology, and joy. Results: Respondents (N=69) identified access to resources as the most important unmet need for caregivers (53%). The survey found that medication and routine tracking applications and mobility assistive devices were the most commonly used forms of technology. The dominant need expressed by caregivers was for better access to resources, with improved access to health care services and financial support. Interviewees reported barriers to accessing resources, including high costs and difficulties in selecting appropriate technology resources. Additionally, centralizing resources and simplifying the process of locating support was recommended as a solution. Conclusions: The study showed that caregivers felt inadequately supported and did not frequently use technology due to barriers of access and usability of products. Strategies in product design and user communication that engage dementia care partners would likely accelerate adoption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".