This project focuses on contributing to a feeling of connectedness for people in the mid to late stages of dementia living in a nursing home. Feeling connected is still important for people living with dementia. They may suffer from disabilities caused by their disease, losing their memory and ability to make decisions, but there are also things that are not likely to be affected by dementia. A person with dementia stays capable of feeling negative emotions, like fear and pain, and positive emotions, like interest and happiness. Therefore, it is important to contribute to feelings of connectedness, to support emotional well-being. My framework on connectedness identifies that, based on universal human needs, connectedness can be divided into three types: social, personal and physical connectedness. Fulfilling one or more of the human needs related to a type of connectedness, leads to an increased feeling of being socially, personally or physically connected. People with moderate to severe dementia living in a nursing home, spend of their time in static environments every day. This means that they are surrounded by static objects and non-responsive, apathetic fellow residents. These static environments cause people to become apathetic or restless, which negatively impacts all three types of connectedness and hereby decreases emotional well-being. As the moments where people spend time in static environments happen when care givers are busy with their caring duties, I envision to offer something for these moments that can be used by a resident without the help of care givers and can be used individually, without the need for fellow residents. Therefore, this project focusses on the individual side of connectedness: personal and physical connectedness. The goal is to design a playful product that enables moments of physical and personal connectedness for people in the mid to late stages of dementia, to support emotional well-being in static nursing home environments. To guide the design process, the following interaction vision was created: the interaction should feel like playing with a ladybug: proactive, lively, explorative, enchanting, subtle and open-ended. In an iterative design process, multiple idea directions were explored, and a concept was developed through the creation and evaluation of several prototypes. This resulted in the final concept: Twinkle., Twinkle consists of a sphere, with an interactive dynamic light inside of it. This light can move across the surface of the sphere to proactively try to attract the attention of residents and trigger the curiosity in them to initiate interaction. When an interaction is started, the behavior of the light will change depending on the actions of the user. This way, it allows the user to explore the possibilities of the object. This way, Twinkle provides both cognitive and sensory stimulation to enhance personal and physical connectedness and thereby support emotional well-being for people living with moderate to severe dementia to bring back the twinkle in their eyes.

The aim of this thesis was to enable people in the last stage of dementia, that are confined to their bed or room, and the people around them with shared positive moments. In order to design an experimental concept proposal that could accomplish that aim, the emotional needs of people living with dementia and the people around them were explored. Research activities consisting of a literature review, documentaries review and conducting interviews were conducted to generate understanding of the context. Analysing the findings from these activities resulted in identifying the emotional needs and an overview was presented in a stakeholder journey map. It was discovered that due to dementia, people start to live in another ‘inner past world’ that looks a lot like the past. This causes a lot of anxiety to people living with dementia. It was revealed that by bringing back their personal memories from the past, people living with dementia are able to get out of their “inner past world’ and get back to the actual world. This causes them to feel at ease and happy. These personal memories are part of their identity, so focussing on their identity is very crucial in reducing their anxiety. However, bringing back memory events is not easy for people living with dementia. In the last phase, people living with dementia are only able to communicate when their senses are activated. Stimulating their senses is essential for them to connect with their identity and thus to get that at ease and happy feeling. From these insights the following design goal was formulated: “Making the Person living with Dementia to feel at ease by giving them the ability to reconnect with their identity and interests.” From this design goal and the findings in the analysis, a concept direction was driven. The concept direction describes that the concept consists of three parts: an input, an internal part and an output. The different parts are connected to each other over time. The concept starts with an input where the identity of the person living with dementia is explored with a tool, specifically focussing on personal experiences. The information gained during the input will be internally turned into sensory elements that are placed in the output’s part of the concept. When people living with dementia are in the last stage of dementia the concept’s output can stimulate them with the identity events gathered during the input. By presenting this output with sensory stimulation, people living with dementia are able to connect with the event. The concept direction was the foundation of the exploration during ideation. By combining findings from different ideation activities, ideas on how the input and the output of the concept could possibly look like were generated. The input of the concept should be in the shape of an interview with assignments. The person living with dementia should be supported during this interview by a family member/ the informal caregiver. The interview focuses on gaining information about the background and general likes, but goes deeper into activities that they enjoyed while aged 15 to 25 years old. The output of the concept should focus on stimulating as many senses as possible. Therefore the output consists of a digital element for visual and auditory stimulation and of a physical element for tactile and olfactory stimulation. These decisions were summarized in the concept’s scenario. The scenario was used to evaluate the feasibility of the concept. According to the addressed experts, the concept is very feasible. This is due to the fact that the concept stimulates the senses of people living with dementia to reconnect them with their most memorable memories. In order to clarify what the presented output could look like, examples from multi sensory environments were presented. The elements used in multi sensory environments can be used in the output of the concept, but in a personalised way. Also in comparison to the multi sensory environment, the concept’s output should be an experience brought to the person, instead of bringing the person to the experience. Based on the validation, it could be concluded that the proposed concept could serve as a base to further develop, test and research the possibilities of personalised multi sensory stimulation within the private room environment.

According to the WHO, dementia is one of the main causes of elderly dependency and disability worldwide. People with dementia are not the only ones affected. As the demand for care is high, families and caregivers experience physical, emotional, and sometimes financial stress. Up to date, there is no cure for dementia and its progression. The current research nowadays focuses mainly on strategies for preventing dementia and improving people with dementia’s quality of life and those around them. Active Cues (now ‘Tover’) is an organization based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, that aims to create moments of happiness in residential care. They do so with the ToverTafel, an interactive set of projections that stimulates each of the company’s target groups, with games designed specifically for them. The starting point of this project was to enrich Active Cues’ current design process to keep designing for People with Dementia. In the first phases of the project, dementia and the needs of each of the individuals involved (Professional Caregivers, Informal Caregivers, and People with dementia) were researched through literature and generative techniques. It was found that people with dementia are fond of references to their past and that informal caregivers have access to it to a certain extent. Meanwhile, family members who act as informal caregivers go through dementia grief, have deep bonds with the PwD, know their preferences, and develop effective ways of engaging with them. Active Cues’ way of working was also explored. In their design process, professional caregivers are the representatives of PwD living in nursing houses . They support Active Cues by helping understand what happens during their design iterations and bringing suggestions for new games and their improvements. However, professional caregivers are not always aware of people with dementia history and background, nor do they have time to access it to transmit this knowledge to Active Cues. The generative techniques’ interviews show that informal caregivers are potentially rich sources of valuable insights, and they are not part of Active Cues’ design process. Integrating informal caregivers’ input in Active Cues creative design process was proposed to gain contextual knowledge about people with dementia. Based on the generative techniques’ insights, a number of requirements were identified for both the informal caregiver and Active Cues. The project focused only on the informal caregiver’s requirements: promoting reflection, being pertinent in the informal caregiver’s journey, and being light-hearted. After experimenting with digital prototypes and performing co-creation sessions with informal caregivers, a concept called Remi was designed. Remi is a digital journaling service that aims to provide informal caregivers space to decompress, reflect on one’s feelings, connect with others by journaling and sharing stories with Active Cues to generate valuable insights for their creative process. The concept was tested through storyboard sessions and an interaction test supported by semi-structured interviews. It was found that informal caregivers were willing to share personal stories with an organization such as Active Cues. They mentioned it would feel gratifying to know they are contributing to the big goal of improving the quality of life of people living with dementia.