Does assisted cycle therapy influence activities of daily living in older adults with Down syndrome?
To investigate this line of research, a case study was conducted with 4 older adults in their homes, interviews were conducted with 8 caregivers and a controlled lab experiment was conducted with 8 young healthy adults at ASU, to test the sensors. This methodology provides a significant opportunity to advance the scientific field by expanding the present focus on IADL task performance to an integrated assessment of ADL and IADL task performance. Doing so would not only be more effective in identifying functional decline but could also provide a more comprehensive assessment of individuals' functional abilities with independence and also providing the caregivers with much needed respite.
The controlled lab study tested the sensors embedded into daily objects and found them to be reliable, and efficient. Short term exploratory case studies with healthy older adults revealed the challenges associated with design and technical aspects of the current system, while inductive analysis performed on interviews with caregivers helped to generate central themes on which future functional assessment systems need to be designed and built. The key central themes were a) focus on design / user experience, b) consider user's characteristics, personality, behavior and functional ability, c) provide support for independence, and d) adapt to individual user's needs.
This paper will provide a review of the difficulties associated with caregiving for a family member with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) and the intervention strategies used to improve psychosocial wellbeing of the caregiver. A review of various empirical studies compares different intervention strategies and their accessibility and effect on caregiver mental health. The literature suggests that the most effective treatments are those that are based in cognitive behavioral techniques , teaching caregivers how to recognize and regulate negative emotions that arise and to develop coping strategies for stressful situations involving their loved one with ADRD (Cheng et al., 2018). However, there is currently only a limited amount of research done on the topic of pain recognition and management by caregivers for those with ADRD; future research on this topic is needed to help to develop programs to teach caregivers strategies to help them recognize changes associated with pain in their loved one’s health and wellbeing (Kankkunen & Valimaki, 2014). Future research regarding caregivers for those with ADRD will continue to improve the development of family based support programs based in education for recognition of pain symptoms in patients and cognitive behavioral principles to improve caregiver and patient quality of life (Gitlin et al., 2015).