Adapting care robot Tessa for early-stage dementia with implementation through general practitioners

Abstract

Tessa is a social, assistive robot from the company Tinybots, designed to support people with early- to moderate stage dementia and other mild cognitive impairments.
By giving verbal reminders and instructions, programmed by their formal and informal caregivers, Tessa gives people back their self-management and autonomy, enabling them to live independently for a longer period of time. Next to this, Tessa can be used by home care organisations to save physical minutes of care, up to 132 minutes per week (Onderzoek En Ervaringen, n.d.). With the staff shortages in the health care sector and the expected rise of people with dementia from 290,000 in 2021 to 620,000 people in 2050 (Alzheimer Nederland, 2021), the use of e-health solutions like Tessa will become increasingly important.

This master thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, a distribution scenario is designed to implement Tessa through GPs, a potential market for Tinybots to target. Currently, Tessa is implemented through home care organisations with the support of their health insurance. From interviews with GPs and their supporting caregivers like POHs and casemanagers, the appropriate scenario was chosen. In this scenario, the general practitioner gives Tessa as an option to their patient and refers them to a home care organisation that implements Tessa. This scenario gives GPs the opportunity to support their dementia patients while maintaining their current role in which they assess the situation and then refer. Due to a limited time per patient, more involvement than that is not feasible. With dementia especially, most care is immediately taken over by the casemanager. Another important factor is the lack of financial support the GP receives. Without this support, affording Tessa is impossible. In home care, there is a higher chance of financial support which is therefore incorporated in the scenario.

In the second part, the focus is on acceptance. Acceptance of help and therefore, acceptance of Tessa is hard. To increase acceptance by this group of people, the perceived usefulness of the product needs to be increased, which is what the second part of this thesis focuses on. To do this, multiple solutions were proposed surrounding themes like increasing autonomy, independence, compatibility, social connectedness, and trialability. Adding the functions of listening to audiobooks and receiving personal voice messages will give Tessa a relative advantage over the current products elderly use and increase perceived usefulness and social connectedness.

In addition, a light version of Tessa in the form of an app to be used on
people’s own devices is proposed as a solution to lower the barrier to accepting Tessa. An app is more subtle, is better compatible with the elderly who use their phone or tablet and who are still living an active life. When dementia progresses and home care is needed, the app evolves into an app that can be used by home care to provide care.
Since material and logistical costs are saved with an app, a free trial can be offered to potential users. With this, the attribute of trialability is used, which can lead to easier adoption of a new product.
In preparation for the launch of the Tessa app version and the new functions, Tinybots needs to prepare a website and information aimed at people with dementia and their informal caregivers instead of care organisations.
By implementing these design changes, Tinybots can implement Tessa through the GP with the proposed distribution scenario. This means they can use Tessa to support people with dementia and their informal caregivers from very early on and for a longer period of time.