A Taxonomy of Notification Technology for Assisting the Caregivers of Elders with Cognitive Decline

According to the latest United Nations estimations, people with dementia worldwide will increase to over 100 million by 2050 [1]. This is significant not only due to the number of people affected by such disease, but also by the number of people required to care for those patients. The overall objective of our work is to study how ambient intelligent technologies can assist the elder’s caregiver in his/her task of providing high quality care. This paper addresses the issue of information notification for the provision of care, so that the information is current, relevant and appropriate to assist the caregiver. Based on a literature survey, we propose a taxonomy of notification technologies. The resulting taxonomy not only provides a detailed understanding of current notification technologies to assist the elder’s caregiver, but also identifies and proposes new areas of opportunity of notification systems.