Personalisation, customisation and bricolage: how people with dementia and their families make assistive technology work for them

Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ageing and society 2019-11, Vol.39 (11), p.2502-2519
Main Authors: Gibson, Grant, Dickinson, Claire, Brittain, Katie, Robinson, Louise
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptive technology
Bricolage
Caregivers
Chronic illnesses
Dementia
Handicapped assistance devices
Health care
Health services
Medical technology
Older people
Public policy
R&D
Research & development
Social services
Telemedicine
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Assistive technologies (ATs) are being ‘mainstreamed’ within dementia care, where they are promoted as enabling people with dementia to age in place alongside delivering greater efficiencies in care. AT provision focuses upon standardised solutions, with little known about how ATs are used by people with dementia and their carers within everyday practice. This paper explores how people with dementia and carers use technologies in order to manage care. Findings are reported from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 13 people with dementia and 26 family carers. Readily available household technologies were used in conjunction with and instead of AT to address diverse needs, replicating AT functions when doing so. Successful technology use was characterised by ‘bricolage’ or the non-conventional use of tools or methods to address local needs. Carers drove AT use by engaging creatively with both assistive and everyday technologies, however, carers were not routinely supported in their creative engagements with technology by statutory health or social care services, making bricolage a potentially frustrating and wasteful process. Bricolage provides a useful framework to understand how technologies are used in the everyday practice of dementia care, and how technology use can be supported within care. Rather than implementing standardised AT solutions, AT services and AT design in future should focus on how technologies can support more personalised, adaptive forms of care.
ISSN:0144-686X
1469-1779
DOI:10.1017/S0144686X18000661