I now wanted to explore the technology being used by people with dementia, to what ways design could be used to improve the experience of living with dementia.

Dementia Technology Research

To start, I looked directly at dementia related technology, mainly what technology can help with and what specific types of devices are used to do so.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• Safety is just as important as directly helping memory.
• Automation should be as a fail safe, not a way of taking away control.
• Sensors and tracking is important, can help to build up patterns. </aside>

Smart Homes

Next I wanted to look at smart homes and how they are used to help people with dementia.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• Passive assistance > Active assistance.
• Ai integration could be really valuable, recognising trends/patterns etc.
• Helpful for both carers and medical professionals - peace of mind and data.
• Currently a collection of devices, no all in one system.
• Standardisation is needed.
• Voice activation is very valuable.
• Certain interface design trends can be very good, for example heavily pictorial interfaces. </aside>

Upcoming Technology

The last part of my technology research looked at up and coming or future technology. As this project allowed me to explore speculative design, I wanted to see what sort of bounds I should be pushing to make sure my work was in some way feasible. My primary resource for this the Future Interface Group, a research lab which creates new way to interact with technology. A lot of their work is very experimental but is an example of what could be common place in a few years time.

<aside> ▶️ Key Takeaways

• Being able to track specific objects in a room would be really useful.
• Direction to something they are trying to find could be hints.
• There are ways to make interact-able environments discretely without having loaded of sensors all over the room.
• Tech like this can be used to make smart homes more human. </aside>

With a good sense of the technology I was working with, I now moved onto competitor analysis.

Competitor Analysis