Socially Assistive Robots for Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease: A Scoping Review

Background The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer's Disease (AD), is challenging for both those affected as well as for their care providers, and caregivers. Socially assistive robots (SARs) offer promising supportive care to assist in the complex management associated with AD. Objectives To conduct a scoping review of published articles that proposed, discussed, developed or tested SAR for interacting with AD patients. Methods A scoping review framework suggested by Arksey and O'Malley was used from the date of inception until January 2022 in eight bibliographic databases. The inclusion criteria were all populations; all interventions using SAR for AD; any outcome related to AD patients or care providers or caregivers; all study types; and English language. Results After deduplication, 1251 articles were screened. Titles and abstracts screening resulted to 252 articles. Full-text review retained 125 articles, with 72 focusing on daily life support, 46 on cognitive therapy, and 7 on cognitive assessment. Conclusion This study identified current research and gaps in SARs for AD patients. However, there are still technical challenges. These include the necessity to engage patients, care providers and caregivers from both genders in the investigations about end-user needs, assess the impact of SAR type on HRI, providing more details about their methods for AI-powered SARs, and considering additional factors such as usability, safety, etc. that were not thoroughly investigated in this study. Investigation of these findings could resolve some of the current technological limitations, and they may help SARs reach nearly the full potential.