Implications of Dementia and Age-related Memory Impairments on the Design of IT-based Systems - a User Study

Abstract:
In order to support elderly people with obvious cognitive restrictions up until reaching a moderate stage of dementia to live at home independently, the BMBF-funded research project WebDA (Webbasierte Dienste für Ältere Menschen und Angehörige/Web-based Services for Elderly People and Family Carers) aims at offering a range of web-based services to allow these different user groups to manage their everyday life by accounting for typical declines of skills e.g. in the area of memory and accomplishment of activities of daily living. All services are also accessible from remote by family carers for instance the object locator allowing to search for mislaid objects being tagged with RFID-technology. This service was subject of the user study reported on in the following where 30 test participants with reduced memory skills due to age-related processes up to severe dementia took part. In the development of the WebDA-services a strict user-centred design approach is followed, so that in course of the project several user studies will be carried out to ensure appropriateness. The WebDA-project is in its beginning stage so that this user study was the first one to evaluate usability of the aforementioned object location service.