**2. Materials and Methods**

### *2.1. Study Design and Sample*

This study had a comparative cross-sectional design, drawing on data from two studies. TECH@HOME [29] is an ongoing prospective study conducted in southern Sweden between 2016 and 2019, focusing aspects of physical and mental health, health related quality of life and use of health care and social services among PwD and their informal caregivers, after installation of a sensors-based monitoring system in their homes. The UP-TECH (Chiatti et al.) [30] project is a multi-component, randomized controlled trial recently conducted in the Italian Marche region during 2014–2015. The main objective was to reduce caregiver burden of family caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to maintain patients with AD at home for as long as possible, through the use of new technologies and of case-managemen<sup>t</sup> approaches. Inclusion criteria for the two studies were very close, although not completely overlapping. In TECH@HOME, the inclusion criteria were: a diagnosis of major neurocognitive disorders with a mild to moderate severity; a Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE-SR) between 14 and 24 [31]; a Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) score between 1 and 5; living at home; being able to understand and communicate in Swedish; and having an informal caregiver [29]. Dyads were enrolled through the primary health care centers and the municipalities. Inclusion criteria of UP-TECH were [30]: Alzheimer's diagnosis at an intermediate stage; and MMSE between 10 and 20. Potential participants were recruited at the Alzheimer Evaluation Units [30]. To improve the comparability of the two samples, we selected in this study only people with dementia with a MMSE between 14 and 24 and their caregivers. The final sample resulted in 89 Swedish and 317 Italian dyads.
