Safe walking technology for people with dementia

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to understand how safe walking technology can be designed to fit the needs of people with dementia. Taking inspiration from modern dementia care philosophy, and its emphasis on the individual with dementia, we have performed in-depth investigations of three persons' experiences of living with early-stage dementia. From interviews and co-design workshops with them and their family caregivers, we identified several factors that influence people with dementia's attitudes toward safe walking technology, and how they want the technology to assist them. Relevant factors include: The desire for control and self-management, the subjective experiences of symptoms, personal routines and skills, empathy for care-givers, and the local environment in which they live. Based on these findings, we argue there is a need to reconsider "surveillance" as a concept on which to base design of safe walking technology. We also discuss implications for design ethics.

Towards Participatory Prototyping with Older Adults with and Without Cognitive Impairment: Challenges and Lessons Learned

“…• Sharing back results not only promotes motivation and engagement of participants, but is also important to remembering and thus providing more context to subsequent activities (cf. activity 5; this topic is also discussed in [7]). • If results are rather abstract (e.g.…”

“…Holbø et al [7] investigated how to design a safe walking device considering the needs of older adults with dementia. Conducting interviews and PD workshops, they identified factors that influenced the participants' attitudes towards these devices and how they expected these devices to help them.…”

“…Although some authors investigated how to design with or for people with dementia [1,2], [6], [8], [14], [18], we encountered few examples (e.g. [7]) of involving older adults with cognitive impairments in the stage of prototyping. Furthermore, guidelines, recommendations and insights identified by the respective authors are relatively abstract.…”

“…Although other authors have reported on PD with older adults with and without cognitive impairments [1], [5,6,7,8,9], [15], [19,20], [25], few reported on low-fidelity prototyping with these participants as co-designers as opposed to informants or evaluators [8]. The objective of this work is thus to contribute to filling this gap.…”

Challenges in doing participatory design with people with dementia

“…Although we see good examples of working in a participatory manner with people with dementia (Holbø, et al, 2013;Lindsay, Brittain, et al, 2012;Mayer & Zach, 2013;Meiland et al, 2012), the question we are trying to answer in this paper, is what the challenges experienced in doing PD with people with dementia in two projects were. We will look at the role of the participants (person with dementia, designer,…), the analysis and the scalability of the research results and the impact of the PD process on the participants.…”