A review of the role of assistive technology for people with dementia in the hours of darkness.

Assistive Technology (AT) has been utilized to support people with dementia (PwD) and their carers in the home. Such support can extend the time that PwD can remain safely at home and reduce the burden on the tertiary healthcare sector. Technology can assist people in the hours of darkness as well as during the day. The objective of this literature review is to evaluate reported healthcare technologies appropriate to night time care. This paper summarises and categorises the current evidence base. In all, 131 abstracts were returned from a database search, yielding fifty four relevant papers which were considered in detail. While night-time specific studies identified very few papers (4 papers, 7%), most of the more general AT findings could be adopted to benefit night-time assistance. Studies have used technology for prompting and reminding as loss of time and forgetfulness are major problems; for monitoring daily activities in a sensor enriched environment and utilised location aware technologies to provide information to enhance safety. Technology also supports a range of therapies to alleviate symptoms. Therapies include the delivery of music and familial pictures for reminiscing, the use of light therapy to enhance wellbeing and the provision of mental tasks to stimulate the brain and maintain activity levels.

Multimedia stimulation for psychophysiological investigation.

This paper describes a multimedia approach to sensory stimulation in psychophysiological studies. High resolution colour images are presented to a subject by a Delphi stimulus program, controlled by a data acquisition system which concurrently records cognitive Event Related Potentials from the subject. The acquisition PC is linked to the stimulus PC using serial communications and requests slide material using a character based protocol. The sound card in the data acquisition system can present concurrent complex auditory stimuli for multimedia experiments.