Tile based outdoor navigation for people with dementia syndromes

Abstract:
The number of elderly people with dementia syndromes increases in all developed countries. Therefore it becomes increasingly important to develop computer systems, which support these people to master their everyday life. In this article we present an assistive navigation system for people with dementia syndromes that helps them to orientate themselves in outdoor environments and to carry out spatially distributed tasks. The system realizes turn based photo navigation augmented with landmarks, based on a novel way of map processing. The routing algorithm works on pixel tiles rather than vector maps to achieve the necessary precision. The system's UI accounts for the characteristics of the target user group by minimizing the cognitive load. The results of user tests indicate a substantial benefit for dementia patients, while the navigation concept could also be used in a wider range of applications.