People with dementia face a decline of their cognitive functions, including memory impairment and difficulty to orient in time and space. Assistive applications can ease the effects of dementia by assuming and supporting impaired functions. Context-awareness is an accepted paradigm for assistive applications. It enables interactive systems to react appropriately to situations that occur during daily routines of people with dementia. However, there currently is no recommended framework to view symptoms of dementia in terms of context and context-awareness. The aim of this paper is to inform designers in the early design stage of assistive applications how requirements and needs of people with dementia can be represented in a context-aware application. Based on a systematic literature review, we elicit which context types are linked to the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers and how they are used in existing assistive applications in dementia care. Our focus is on applications evaluated and assessed with people with dementia. We also classify these assistive applications by the offered context-aware services. We observe that these should not be limited within the realm of the local residence; context types that are valuable in-house can, to a certain extent, also be leveraged outside a local residence. We believe the proposed framework is a tool for application builders and interface designers to accomplish an informed design of systems for people with dementia.

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patient's social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system.

The wide diversity of consumer devices has led to new methodologies and techniques to make digital content available over a broad range of devices with minimal effort. In particular the design of the interactive parts of a system has been the subject of a lot of research efforts because these parts are the most visible and are critical for the usability (and thus use) of a system. One thing that is missing in many current approaches is the ability to combine these new methodologies and techniques with a user-centric approach to ensure preferences from and requirements for a specific user are taken into account besides the device adaptations. In this paper we analysed the applicability of MPEG-21, part 7: Digital Item Adaptation, for the adaptation of a user interface to user characteristics. We show how the high-level XML-based user interface description language UIML in combination with an MPEG-21-based user profile enables designers to create accessible and personalised multi-device user interfaces. Using this combination results in user interfaces that can be deployed on a broad range of devices while taking into account user preferences with minimal effort. This approach enhances accessibility to digital items on various platforms, since all interactions with digital items should be supported by an appropriate user interface.