artificial intelligence

The increasing number of older adults with cognitive deficits, including dementia, poses a major challenge for public health in the United States. At the same time, the limited number of informal and professional caregivers available to support this rapidly growing population is of mounting concern. Not only does population aging limit the number of potential caregivers, but extant caregivers often lack skills to provide quality care.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Many older adults wish to age in place, and voice‐controlled intelligent personal assistants (VIPAs; eg, Amazon Echo and Google Home) potentially could support unmet home needs. No prior studies have researched the real‐world use of VIPAs among older adults. We sought to explore how older adults and caregivers utilize VIPAs. DESIGN/MEASUREMENT: Retrospective review of all verified purchase reviews of the Amazon Echo posted on Amazon.com between January 2015 and January 2018, with filtering for health‐related older adult key words.

Informal caregivers often complain about missing knowledge. A knowledge-based personalized educational system is developed, which provides caregiving relatives with the information needed. Yet, evaluation against domain experts indicated, that parts of the knowledge-base are incorrect. To overcome these problems the system can be extended by a learning capacity and then be trained further utilizing feedback from real informal caregivers. To extend the existing system an artificial neural network was trained to represent a large part of the knowledge-based approach.

Objectives: To describe the current evidence of studies examining the use of information technology for family caregivers of persons with cancer.