Technologies for monitoring patients with Alzheimer’s disease: A systematic mapping study and taxonomy

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an incurable disease and a type of dementia. About 55 million people around the world have AD. However, technologies have been used to assist in the healthcare of AD, supporting physicians in the palliative care of patients. This article presents a systematic mapping study (SMS) to identify articles that use technologies to monitor patients with AD in order to show an overview of the literature, identifying gaps and research opportunities in this field. The scientific contribution of this work is to identify monitoring technologies related to AD and highlight current trends on the subject. The paper uses the term technologies as hardware infrastructure and devices or systems without considering software technologies. In addition, this article proposes a taxonomy for the domain of technologies applied to AD patients. The SMS study was conducted in six databases, including articles from 1997 to 2021. An initial search resulted in 7,781 articles. After applying filter criteria, throwing automatic selection on databases, and manual assortment, 171 articles were selected. Subsequently, a second search was performed to reduce the list of articles and filter by the specific search objective of articles focused on technologies for monitoring with tracking, resulting in 74 works. The main results obtained are: (1) a relevant number of articles (43.42%) reported solutions used in sensor-based devices; (2) several works (33.33%) have the interaction focus on Position/Distance/Proximity/Location sensor type; (3) another group of articles has a secondary focus on Emergency help (18.97%). The results indicated the need for technologies to help caregivers monitor patients, in addition to evidence of research opportunities in palliative care and support for the daily activities of AD patients.