Towards Intelligent and Implicit Assistance for People with Dementia: Support for Orientation and Navigation

Abstract

To date, most healthcare technologies for orientation and navigation for people with dementia or with cognitive impairments have been developed for outdoor environments. These systems require skills in handling smartphone or PDA applications from users. In this paper, the authors focus on the needs of people with moderate and severe dementia, who are unable to use smartphones and are living in nursing homes or specialized fulltime care facilities. A new approach is presented, based on iterative people-centered design processes, explores calm computing and implicit interaction paradigms for guiding people with subtle cues integrated in the indoor environment. This intelligent and implicit assistance is supported by a three-part framework: a tracking system, a separate guiding system and an intelligent system. The guiding system approach has been tested on several people with dementia. The first results are promising and the feedback from stakeholders is positive but more participants are needed for an empirical analysis.