Designing for dementia, (BRE project): technology to maintain evidence based activities

Centre for Dementia Seminar Series 2018

Speaker: Professor Eef Hogervorst (University of Loughborough)

Abstract

In this talk we will first describe the research leading up to Chris and Sally's house between Loughborough University, UCL and the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Nottingham. This research done for project PRIDE (PRomoting Independence in DEmentia) showed that keeping physically (Soni et al, 2017) and psychosocially active (d'Orsi et al., 23017; Raffson et al., 2017) could reduce dementia risk by half and that once people have dementia, keeping physically active also reduced their cognitive decline (Soni et al., 2017). Research at Maastricht University showed that people with dementia spend most of their time at home. That led to development of ICT and technology to improve activity uptake in the home, including our resistance band exercises (PDF) which improved memory function and self-efficacy in sedentary middle-aged and elderly people (Hogervorst, 2012).

We developed dementia persona (Jias, Hignett, Hogervorst, 2017) to guide designers and architects and promote better understanding of the specific requirements of people with dementia. We were then funded to renovate a site of Building Research Excellence (BRE) at Watford to develop the Dementia house or 'Chris and Sally's Home'. The BRE is visited by 21000 visitors yearly to inform architects, designers and the public of innovative building materials and designs. In this project we hope to capture feed-back on our technology installed at Chris and Sally's home, which is also tested at our Living Laboratory at Loughborough University.