Feasibility-Usability Study of a Tablet App Adapted Specifically for Persons with Cognitive Impairment—SMART4MD (Support Monitoring and Reminder Technology for Mild Dementia)

Abstract

Population ageing within Europe has major social and economic consequences. One of the most devastating conditions that predominantly affects older people is dementia. The SMART4MD (Support Monitoring and Reminder Technology for Mild Dementia) project aims to develop and test a health application specifically designed for people with mild dementia. The aim of this feasibility study was to evaluate the design of the SMART4MD protocol, including recruitment, screening, baseline examination and data management, and to test the SMART4MD application for functionality and usability before utilization in a full-scale study. The feasibility study tested the protocol and the app in Spain and Sweden. A total of nineteen persons with cognitive impairment, and their informal caregivers, individually performed a task-based usability test of the SMART4MD app model in a clinical environment, followed by four-week testing of the app in the home environment. By employing a user-centered design approach, the SMART4MD application proved to be an adequate and feasible interface for an eHealth intervention. In the final usability test, a score of 81% satisfied users was obtained. The possibility to test the application in all the procedures included in the study generated important information on how to present the technology to the users and how to improve these procedures.

Using a Mobile Application for Health Communication to Facilitate a Sense of Coherence: Experiences of Older Persons with Cognitive Impairment

“…Furthermore, other age-related challenges may have contributed to the participants’ experiences of using the mobile application, although functional impairment was an exclusion criterion in the SMART4MD project. A feasibility study was conducted to improve the application in the SMART4MD project [ 70 ], and the final version was used in this study. Lastly, because the participants’ CI in the SMART4MD project was based on MMSE scores, the scores might not have been an accurate indication of the participants’ cognitive ability at the time of the interviews for the present study.…”

User innovation rings the bell for new horizons in e-health: a bibliometric analysis

“…The results of coding the users involved in the 169 sample publications show that they fall into one of the following seven categories:Patients or persons related to a specific disease in different stages such as under-treatment patients, cured patients, screened patients or patients in remedy (Leite and Hodgkinson, 2021; Schmidt et al. , 2021; Quintana et al. , 2020).…”

Associations Between Mobile Health Technology use and Self-rated Quality of Life: A Cross-sectional Study on Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment

“…To study mHealth technology use in relation to QoL, variables on access to the internet, self-assessed technical skills, frequency of usage, and attitude toward mHealth technology were included ( Anderberg et al, 2019 ). These variables were used to assess the participants’ perception of using mHealth technology and the inclusion were based on previous findings from a qualitative study and a feasibility study using the same sample ( Christiansen et al, 2020 ; Quintana et al, 2020 ).…”