Designing a wayfinding device for people with dementia

Abstract

A majority of people with dementia live at home. Most people living alone experience problems with wayfinding due to symptoms of their disease, like memory impairment, spatial disorientation, and loss of planning abilities. These problems can cause them to reduce their outside travel range or even stop going on independent outdoor visits altogether. The inability to go outside for errands significantly impacts a person's ability to live independently and can contribute to their institutionalization. This problem is challenging since the ability to go outside and maintain your everyday life is seen as a primary need for people with dementia. Furthermore, being outside is found to improve sleep patterns, slow cognitive decline, and reduce agitation in people with dementia.

Current solutions that help people with dementia in the outdoor environment focus on tracking the person with dementia to warrant their safety. In these products, the person with dementia is a passive user dependent on the person who can see where they are. Navigation devices developed to enable people with dementia to find their direction are all designed for research purposes. Furthermore, these devices give too little context information and are not adaptable to different needs and requirements.

Therefore, this project aims to design a wayfinding device that supports people with early to middle-stage dementia to maintain an active lifestyle by enabling them to navigate to frequent and infrequently visited outdoor places. Safe, independent, & with confidence. The primary target group for using the device is people with dementia. However, the needs and requirements of their informal caregivers were also considered.

Workshops, walks, and interviews showed the struggles people with dementia encounter while they go outside. Moreover, these research activities showed the importance of landmarks for people with dementia while wayfinding. Challenges like complex memory-based navigation steps were also revealed during these activities. Therefore, a personalizable landmark base navigation strategy was used as the basis for the final design.

The final wayfinding device uses NFC cards to activate navigation routes on the smartphone. The person with dementia can carry these navigation cards with them and only has to insert them in a card holder on the back of their phone case to start the navigation system. The navigation system will then guide the person with dementia to their destination by showing a yellow arrow on top of footage from their surroundings using Augmented Reality Navigation. The caregiver's involvement is essential in setting up the navigation system since they must help their loved one by loading the correct route on the navigation card and highlighting personal landmarks.

Multiple tests led to optimizing the interaction between the person with dementia and the navigation app. This resulted in a wayfinding device that supports people with dementia through intuitive navigation cues to visit places independently. This wayfinding device helps people with dementia regain charge over their active lifestyle.