Co-design to support engagement in activities of daily living and meaningful activities for people living with dementia

Dementia is a chronic and progressive neurodegenerative illness, which can lead to significant difficulties in a person’s capacity to perform activities of daily living and engage in meaningful activities. The Smart Dementia Care project aims to establish an understanding of how best to design digital tools that persons with dementia and their carers will find useful and usable for care planning and goal setting. This paper discusses the first phase of this project and describes how co-design is being used to support engagement in activities of daily living and meaningful activities for people living with the early stages of dementia, with such engagement intended to extend the period of independent living for the person with dementia. It is anticipated that adopting a co-design approach and involving people living with dementia throughout the design cycle will allow for an application that is viewed as usable and intuitive while also acting as a tool of empowerment rather than a burden. At the same time, the intention is that integrating personalized goal-setting functionality focussing on individualized activities and everyday tasks will result in a system that is useful and effective.