Developing an Intelligent Environment to Support People with Early-Stage Dementia: from User-Needs to a Real-Life Prototype

Intelligent environments can offer support to people with early-stage dementia, who often experience problems with maintaining their circadian rhythm. The fo-cus of this work is developing a prototype of an Intelligent Environment for as-sisting these people with their daily rhythm while living independently at home. Following the four phases of the Empathic Design Framework (Explore, Trans-late, Process, and Validate), the needs of people with dementia and their caregiv-ers were incorporated into the design. In the exploration phase, a need assessment took place using focus groups (N=12), observations (N=10), and expert inter-views (N=27). Then, to determine the requirements for a prototype of an intelli-gent environment, the second phase, Translate, used three co-creation sessions with different stakeholder groups. In these sessions, Mind Maps (N=55) and Idea Generation Cards (N=35) were used. These resulted in a set of 10 require-ments on the following topics: context-awareness, pattern recognition, adaptation, support, personalization, autonomy, modularity, dementia proof interaction, costs, data, and privacy. Finally, in the third phase, the requirements were applied to a real-life prototype by a multidisciplinary design team of researchers, (E-Health) tech companies, designers, software engineers with representatives of eight or-ganizations. The prototype serves as a basis for further development of Intelligent Environments to enable people with dementia to live longer independently at home.