Quality of life and quality of care: A pilot mobile app to promote the psychosocial well‐being of informal caregivers of older adults with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundAn increasing number of people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) live in their own homes with intensive assistance from informal caregivers (e.g., family or friends). Progressive symptoms of ADRD can affect the quality of life of the caregivers as well as people with ADRD. Mobile technology shows great potential to fill this gap with its accessibility, affordability, and repository for information. The purpose of this study was to develop a pilot mobile app (QLQC Tracker) that helps caregivers track and review their psychosocial well‐being and to test its reliability and usability.MethodOur methodology in developing QLQC Tracker leverages existing Google cloud data services for logging of encrypted data. The Android Studio development environment was utilized for designing, building, and testing the app while Matlab was utilized for decryption, parsing of data, and development of the multilayer perceptron to process the data received from the app. The app entails four categories: mental health, social activities, frequently asked questions, and helpline information. The app informs the caregivers with trends in their overall psychosocial well‐being on a weekly basis. College students were invited to test the reliability and usability of the app (N=45). Questions were asked using the USE (Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of use) questionnaire (Gao, Kortum, & Oswald, 2018).ResultFirst, each participant was asked to enter data and click each tab up to 10 times. In total, the app was run 310 times and the reported crash rate was 0.84%. The overall satisfaction score of the app was 6.07 (SD=1.23; range 1‐9). Lastly, the mean value of the usability score of the app was 6.22 (SD=1.15; range 1‐9). The students aged between 20‐49 (n=27) scored 6.04 (SD=1.34) and the students aged 50+ (n=18) scored 6.50 (SD=0.71) for the usability of the app.ConclusionQLQC Tracker helps informal caregivers understand their psychosocial well‐being by tracking their perceived burdens and levels of social activities. Effective care planning for people with ADRD should include informal caregivers, and the cumulative well‐being data of the caregivers will support the care planning process.