Putting dementia into context - A selective literature review of assistive applications for users with dementia and their caregivers

Vogt, Joel; Luyten, Kris; Van den Bergh, Jan; Coninx, Karin; Meier, Andreas

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34347-6_11

Joel Vogt, Kris Luyten, Jan Van den Bergh, Karin Coninx, & Andreas Meier, Putting dementia into context - A selective literature review of assistive applications for users with dementia and their caregivers, in Marco Winckler, Peter Forbrig, & Regina Bernhaupt (eds.), Human-Centered Software Engineering - 4th International Conference, HCSE 2012, Toulouse, France, October 29-31, 2012. Proceedings,181-198 (Springer 2012). DOI WWW PDF

Abstract:

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.