Mentalizing imagery therapy to augment skills training for dementia caregivers: protocol for a randomized, controlled trial of a mobile application and digital phenotyping

Abstract

More than 50 million people worldwide live with a dementia, and most are cared for by family members. Family caregivers often experience chronic stress and insomnia, resulting in decreased mental and physical health. Accessibility of in-person stress reduction therapy is limited due to caregiver time constraints and distance from therapy sites. Mentalizing imagery therapy (MIT) provides mindfulness and guided imagery tools to reduce stress, promote self and other understanding, and increase feelings of interconnectedness. Combining MIT with caregiver skills training might enable caregivers to both reduce stress and better utilize newly learned caregiving skills, but this has never been studied. Delivering MIT through a smartphone application (App) has the potential to overcome difficulties with scalability and dissemination and offers caregivers an easy-to-use format. Harnessing passive smartphone data provides an important opportunity to study behavioral changes continuously and with higher granularity than routine clinical assessments. This protocol describes a randomized, controlled, superiority trial in which 120 family dementia caregivers, aged 60 years or older, will be assigned to smartphone App delivery of caregiver skills with MIT (experimental condition) or without MIT (control condition). The primary objectives of the trial are (1) to assess whether the experimental condition is superior to control on reducing family caregiver stress, insomnia and related outcomes and (2) to demonstrate the feasibility of developing behavioral markers from passive smartphone data that predict health outcomes in older adults. Trial outcomes may inform the suitability of our intervention for caregivers and provide new methods for assessment of older adults.