about

the platform in the context of the Interreg NWE Certification D

general introduction

Intro to the project

This website is meant to be a tool that can be used to inform product, system and service development to support people with dementia. The content provided in this platform invites to adapt the complexity of the language and the interaction to the abilities of the users, taking into account symptoms related to the different stages of dementia (difficulties with complex attention, executive functioning, learning and memory, language, perceptual-motor) and possible comorbidities. It is important to recognize and respect the personhood of people living with dementia, therefore products should be designed to avoid stigmatisation (by being too medical or gender-biassed) or infantilising (by being childish or too simple), and they should not be used to constrain or pacify the person. The initial preposition is to make sure that the product is as inclusive as possible, taking into account age, gender, educational background of the user while designing, and making sure that it’s clear who the product is meant for.

Section 1 proposes a set of requirements developed as a basis for the activities in the living labs, providing a design space in which new opportunities for products can be identified and enabling SMEs and care organisations to improve their offer.

Go to Guidelines

Section 2 presents a set of case studies (products involved in the voucher scheme wave 1 and 2 of the Cert-D project, products developed by research groups) enhancing the positive qualities of the interaction

Go to Product cases

Section 3 proposes an interactive tool that helps SMEs to learn how to involve persons with dementia during their product development. Specific activities are associated to the different phases of development, and the approaches are explained with tips and tricks that aim to guide the SMEs to find the right support. Co-design sessions, evaluation and/or validation phase in real life environments to make sure that your proposed solution is useful and addressed the real needs of this peculiar target group are some examples of proposed approaches.

Go to Toolkit

The Requirements and the Delphi study

In the first part of the Certification-D project, the partners have worked on the set up of a series of requirements that, when implemented, contribute to empower People with Dementia and facilitate their interaction with products and services.

The outcomes have been collected in a document that can be downloaded here [link to pdf to be added]. In this section of the website you will find a simplified and reduced series of elements to take into account when designing a product for people with dementia.

Explore the Guidelines

You can read more about the process and the challenges faced by the researchers in “The Challenges of Creating Design Requirements for Products for People with Dementia” by Rita Maldonado Branco, Niels Hendriks, Lieke Lenaerts and Andrea Wilikinson, in R. Brankaert and al. (eds.), Dementia Lab 2021: Supporting Ability Trough Design, Design for Inclusion 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70293-9_2

References and other projects
We are not the first ones doing research on design for people with dementia, and hopefully we will not be the last: that is why we incorporated a section with references to projects, papers and other relevant resources. If you know other projects and case studies that might be interesting to incorporate, let us know by sending us an e-mail!

Other projects & references

access useful resources to know more about the researches on design for people with dementia around the word