Effectiveness of smart living environments to support older adults to age in place in their community: an umbrella review protocol

Abstract

IntroductionFrailty is a vulnerable condition exposing older adults to incidental adverse health events that negatively impact their quality of life and increase health and social costs. Digital solutions may play a key role in addressing this global problem and in particular, smart living environments. Smart living environments involve a notion of measurement or collection of data via several sensors, capturing the person’s behaviours in the home or the person’s health status over a long period of time. It thus has great potential for home support for older adults. The objective of this umbrella review will be: (1) to document the effectiveness of smart living environments to support ageing in place for frail older adults and (2) among the reviews assessing the effectiveness of smart living environment, to gather evidence on what factors and strategies were identified as influencing the implementation process.Methods and analysisWe will include systematic and scoping reviews of both quantitative and qualitative primary studies with or without meta-analysis focusing on assessing the effectiveness of interventions through smart living environments to support older adults in the community to age in place. The literature search will be done through the following biomedical, technological and sociological citation databases: MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science and PsycINFO, and quality assessment of the reviews will be done thought AMSTAR2 checklist. The analysis of the results will be presented in narrative form.Ethics and disseminationOur review will rely exclusively on published data from secondary sources and will thus not involve any interactions with human subjects. The results will be presented at international conferences and publications.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42021249849.