Positive design of smart interactive fabric artifacts for people with dementia

Confronting the expected rise of dementia as a major health care problem raises many questions about the best ways to adapt the health system to deal with it. To the extent that intelligent assistive technologies can help, there seems to be value in comforting fabric artifacts enhanced by electronic games and activities designed to support, engage and entertain people with dementia. Local cottage industries which now support the creation of textile crafts should be empowered to scale up to meet the growing demand for such products. New design concepts are required to accomplish this in the face of rising costs and limited resources. This paper proposes a four-step design process that meets this need, and provides practical suggestions about how it could be applied in this context. A number of examples are included

Weaving Lighthouses and Stitching Stories: Blind and Visually Impaired People Designing E-textiles

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants

Smart textiles for improved quality of life and cognitive assessment

Smart textiles can be used as innovative solutions to amuse, meaningfully engage, comfort, entertain, stimulate, and to overall improve the quality of life for people living in care homes with dementia or its precursor mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This concept paper presents a smart textile prototype to both entertain and monitor/assess the behavior of the relevant clients. The prototype includes physical computing components for music playing and simple interaction, but additionally games and data logging systems, to determine baselines of activity and interaction. Using microelectronics, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and capacitive touch sensors woven into a fabric, the study demonstrates the kinds of augmentations possible over the normal manipulation of the traditional non-smart activity apron by incorporating light and sound effects as feedback when patients interact with different regions of the textile. A data logging system will record the patient’s behavioral patterns. This would include the location, frequency, and time of the patient’s activities within the different textile areas. The textile will be placed across the laps of the resident, which they then play with, permitting the development of a behavioral profile through the gamification of cognitive tests. This concept paper outlines the development of a prototype sensor system and highlights the challenges related to its use in a care home setting. The research implements a wide range of functionality through a novel architecture involving loosely coupling and concentrating artifacts on the top layer and technology on the bottom layer. Components in a loosely coupled system can be replaced with alternative implementations that provide the same services, and so this gives the solution the best flexibility. The literature shows that existing architectures that are strongly coupled result in difficulties modeling different individuals without incurring significant costs. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Interactive prototypes in the participatory development of product-service systems

Stakeholders who are part of the development process of a new Product-Service System (PSS) could use interactive prototypes during meetings to exchange different point of views. Based on the findings of a conversation analyst and the reflections of a design researcher we compared three explication techniques of how a prototype was involved during such a meeting (for pointing and manipulating, for demonstrating its function and for imitating and/or demonstration through body movement and gesture) with the phases of a co-reflection session (exploration, ideation and confrontation). We found that the prototype was especially useful during the exploration and confrontation phases. Pointing and manipulating helped to make reflections concrete, made it easier to propose small design changes and helped the participants to reach common goals. Interactive prototypes do have their limits, during the ideation phase the prototype did not play an important role

Designing a crossover multisensory picturebook with older adults at a care home

Picturebooks have often been studied in the children’s literature field with a focus on child readers, but recent studies have begun to discuss the cross-age aspect that embraces wider audiences. This study explores the design space for a crossover multisensory picturebook that would also engage older adults via positive design approach. In this multidisciplinary study, we aimed to nurture the positive sides of aging by transforming life-long experiences into narratives in the form of a picturebook that embodies memories and transfers heritage in an engaging way during shared reading. Within this scope, we conducted interviews and design evaluations with older adults in a care home, to iterate the design of the picturebook in a collaborative way. In this paper, we share reflections on the book-making process and discuss how picturebooks can support well-being. Additionally, we speculate on positive interactions that may arise from intergenerational shared reading experiences while adapting a media mainly geared towards children for older adults