Impact of telecare interventions on quality of life in older adults: a systematic review

Background Recently, an increase in the older adult population, their chronic diseases, and functional disabilities have led to an increase in the need for more healthcare services. Telecare is one of the solutions for caring these people and can improve their quality of life. Aim The objective of this study was to investigate impact of telecare interventions on quality of life in older adults. Methods This was a systematic review conducted in 2021. PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, the Cochrane Library, Embase, IEEE Xplore, and ProQuest databases as well as Google Scholar were searched until the end of 2020 to retrieve relevant articles published in English. The quality of the studies was assessed using the National Institutes of Health (NIH) quality assessment checklists and the mixed-methods appraisal tool (MMAT). The risk of bias in the studies was assessed using version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials (RoB 2) and the risk of bias in non-randomized studies-of interventions (ROBINS-I). Results In total, ten out of 1245 articles identified in the initial search, were included in this study. Telemonitoring (n = 7) and telerehabilitation (n = 3) were the most common methods of telecare interventions. Overall, the findings showed that in most studies, different dimensions of quality of life were improved after using these interventions (p < 0.05). Conclusion Evaluating impact of telecare interventions on quality of life, especially in older adults can help system developers to improve current and future telecare technologies to meet users' requirements. Future studies can focus on evaluating the impact of specific telecare systems for a particular target group using different research methodologies.