Enhancing the adoption of mobile health technologies by persons with mild dementia and their care network though an innovative training program

Nowadays with the global population ageing, dementia has become one of the largest societal challenges. Dementia causes loss of autonomy and poses several limitations in terms of functional ability and at the same time exerts a lot of burden on their supports. Mobile Health (mHealth) tools can play a supporting role in terms of promoting self-management and empowering both the people with dementia (PWD) and their supports to deal with everyday challenges. However, still the adoption and the usage of such tools remains low in the community and especially across EU. Towards this direction there is an urgent need to develop innovative training programmes that could facilitate this transition to digitalization of care. The mHealth-AD is an EU initiative that aims to utilize contemporary learning technologies with an emphasis on accessibility and the integration of experiential training activities, which simulates the usage of mHealth technologies in real-life scenarios, so as to ensure the transferability of learning outcomes to the real world. A co-creative approach has been followed documenting the main daily life aspects that PWD would require attention and could benefit from mHealth technologies. Based on early feedback a training programme was created comprising of 4 main educational modules, an online training platform including digital learning materials with several accessibility features, a digital serious game with the intention to enhance the applicability of the knowledge acquired and a comprehensive list of mHealth tools. A multinational evaluation study was conducted to explore PWDs views on the content and the tools developed. The results revealed the usefulness of such an approach, however it seems that both the platform and serious game needs further improvements so as the PWD feel more confident in using them. Future work should encompass studies with larger cohorts of PWD and with a larger period of training to allow for more training time.