Can Automated Vehicles Be Useful to Persons Living With Dementia? The Perspectives of Care Partners of People Living With Dementia

Abstract

Background and objectives: Driving cessation is a complex challenge with significant emotional and health implications for people with dementia, which also affects their family care partners. Automated vehicles (AVs) could potentially be used to delay driving cessation and its adverse consequences for people with dementia and their care partners. Yet, no study to date has investigated whether care partners consider AVs to be potentially useful for people with dementia.

Research design and methods: This mixed-methods study assessed the views of 20 former or current family care partners of people with dementia on AV use by people with dementia. Specifically, questionnaires and semistructured interviews were used to examine care partners' acceptance of AV use by people with dementia and their views about the potential usefulness of AVs for people with dementia.

Results: The results demonstrated that care partners identified possible benefits of AV use by people with dementia such as their anticipated higher social participation. However, care partners also voiced major concerns around AV use by people with dementia and reported significantly lower levels of trust in and perceived safety of AVs if used by the person with dementia in their care compared to themselves. Care partners' concerns about AV use by people with dementia included concerns around the driving of people with dementia that AVs are not designed to address; concerns that are specific to AVs but are not relevant to the nonautomated driving of people with dementia; and concerns that arise from existing challenges around the nonautomated driving of people with dementia but may be exacerbated by AV use.

Discussion and implications: Findings from this study can inform future designs of AVs that are more accessible and useful for people with dementia.

Keywords: Assistive technologies; Care partners; Driving; Qualitative study; Semistructured interview.

Figure 1.

A schematic of the procedure of the study. AV = automated vehicle.

Figure 2.

Care partners ranking of PAV and FAV use by themselves (self) and the person with dementia in their care for three factors of trust, perceived safety, and intention to use. Note: PAV = partially automated vehicle; FAV = fully automated vehicle. The p values are the results of Wilcoxon signed-rank tests conducted to examine the difference in care partners’ perceptions of PAV/FAV if used by themselves compared to the person with dementia (self vs. person with dementia). Mean and standard deviations of the ratings are shown.

Figure 3.

A stacked bar chart of the percentage of care partners’ perception of the driving of people with dementia with nonautomated vehicles, PAVs, and FAVs as separated by driving conditions/tasks. PAV = partially automated vehicle; FAV = fully automated vehicle.

Figure 4.

A thematic map of the reasons identified by care partners for their emerging concerns about the AV use of people with dementia, which are categorized into groundwork, AV characteristics, and characteristics of people with dementia. The identified reasons under each category are connected with an arrow to their corresponding concern. AV = automated vehicle.