Wearables come off, and someone with dementia can't be relied on to put them back. So this review looks only at what stays in the room — smart-home sensors, passive environmental sensors, GPS systems — and asks whether they actually detect or prevent wandering and falls at home.
Wandering and falls are among the most dangerous complications of dementia for people living at home — they lead to injury, hospitalisation, and often an early move into residential care.
Ambient technologies sidestep the central problem with wearables: they ask nothing of the person being monitored. But the evidence is scattered across small, heterogeneous studies, and no review has yet synthesised it for non-wearable systems covering both wandering and falls in community-dwelling adults. This one consolidates what exists and marks where it runs thin.
| Population | Community-dwelling adults with Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia. Excludes nursing-home residents and mild cognitive impairment without a dementia diagnosis. |
| Intervention | Non-wearable remote and ambient monitoring — smart-home sensors, passive environmental sensors, GPS-based location systems. Excludes wearables and anything needing active operation. |
| Comparator | Usual care, no monitoring, standard supervision, or wait-list control. |
| Designs | RCTs, quasi-experimental studies, prospective and retrospective cohorts, before-after studies with a comparator. |
| Window | English-language studies published from January 2015 onward, in home or community settings, any country. |