Review of Methods for Data Collection Experiments with People with Dementia and the Impact of COVID-19

Abstract

The development of a wearable-based system for detecting difficulties in the daily lives of people with dementia would be highly useful in the day-today management of the disease. To develop such a system, it would be necessary to identify physiological indicators of the difficulties, which can be identified by analyzing physiological datasets from people with dementia. However, there is no such data available to researchers. As such, it is vital that data is collected and made available in future. In this paper we perform a review of past physiological data collection experiments conducted with people with dementia and evaluate the methods used at each stage of the experiment. Consideration is also given to the impacts and limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns both on the people with dementia-such people being one of the most at risk and affected groups-and on the efficacy and safety of each of the methods. It is concluded that the choice of method to be utilized in future data collection experiments is heavily dependent on the type and severity of the dementia the participants are experiencing, and that the choice of remote or COVID-secure methods should be used during the COVID-19 pandemic; many of the methods reviewed could allow for the spread of the virus if utilized during a pandemic.

Comparison of Subjective and Physiological Stress Levels in Home and Office Work Environments

“…Approximately 68% of participants attended the workplace in person and 27.6% felt frustrated and 22.4% felt exhausted, both being stressors [82]. One limitation of this study is that the self-reporting of subjective stress and physiological state by participants is often subject to bias [13,31]. Furthermore, the analysis of the physiological data is somewhat limited in scope, with averages being calculated for each data type but no other significant statistical analysis being recorded.…”

“…Firstly, the methodology for a systematic literature review to identify the various and best methods utilised in similar studies in the literature is presented. Next, the results of the fore mentioned literature review are enumerated and discussed, with these results having been previously published [13]. Following this the chapter will justify why the implications of COVID-19 on the methods identified in the review necessitated a pivot on the project, and why the field of work stress was selected for the pivot.…”

“…Section 1.1 of this thesis stated that the initial work conducted on this project was focused on researching using wearable devices and machine learning to support people with dementia. However, this work was halted due to constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns (this is discussed in greater detail in chapter 4 of this thesis) [13,14]. As such it was decided to pivot the research away from using wearables and machine learning to detect and predict dementia-related difficulties and instead to use wearables and machine learning to detect and predict work stress.…”

“…In Harper et al (2021, b) past physiological data collection experiments conducted with people with dementia were reviewed and the methods utilised in the various stages of those experiments were evaluated [13]. The impacts and limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns on the efficacy, safety, and burden-imposition on experiment stakeholders of each method was also discussed.…”

“…Reviews were performed to identify the best wearable device for collecting data from people with dementia, as well as the best methods to use in experiments to collect that data. However, it was concluded that performing a data collection experiment with people with dementia during the COVID-19 pandemic was impractical and potentially unethical [13,14]. As such, stress identification was identified as a new domain for the project to pivot to.…”