Understanding the home environment of older adults living with dementia: A scoping review of assessment tools

ABSTRACT

Rigorous assessments to better understand the person-environment interaction are essential to comprehend how neurocognitive disorders influence in-home functioning of older people living with dementia. No recent synthesis identifies validated instruments targeting the human (e.g. caregivers) and nonhuman (e.g. objects) elements of the home environment interacting with this population and used with the perspective of aging in place. Consequently, following Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) scoping review method, 2,182 articles were identified in six databases and in gray literature. Two reviewers independently selected 23 relevant articles describing 19 validated assessment tools targeting elements of the home interacting with older people with dementia, namely: nonhuman environment (n = 13), human environment (n = 3), and person-environment interaction (n = 3). This overview highlights the scarcity of tools addressing the human environment and the person-environment interaction to foster sustainable at-home living for older people with neurocognitive disorders, demonstrating the need to incorporate new evidence-based, holistic methods into dementia home care.

KEYWORDS:

• Dementia
• older person
• home environment
• person-environment relation
• standardized assessment tools
• scoping review

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Myrian Grondin, who worked as a health sciences librarian at the time of the study, in developing the research strategy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01621424.2023.2290708

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted in conjunction with a master’s degree project that was part of a larger project funded by the Alzheimer Society of Canada under Grant #20-13. This study was also supported by master’s scholarships (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Université de Montréal, Caisse Desjardins de Sault-au-Récollet-Montréal-Nord, Centre de recherche de l’Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal and Mitacs).