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User-centered design for smartwatch-based interventions for People with dementia
ABSTRACT
Background:
Assistive Technologies (ATs) can help people living with dementia (PwD) maintain their everyday activity. Still, there is a gap between potential and usage. Involving future users may help closing this gap, but the impact of participation of PwD is unclear.
Objective:
We aimed to determine if user-centered development of smartwatch-based interventions together with people with dementia (PwD) is feasible. Secondly we evaluated to what extent user feedback is plausible and therefore helpful for technological improvements.
Methods:
The study examined smartwatch interactions of PwD or persons with mild cognitive impairment. All participants were prompted to complete two tasks (drinking water and cognitive task). Prompts were triggered using a smartphone as remote control and were repeated up to three times if participants failed to completely solve a task. N=20 participants received “regular” prompts, N=20 received “intensive” audio-visual prompts to perform everyday tasks. Participants’ reactions were observed remotely via cameras. Users’ feedback was captured with questionnaires, including topics of usability, design, usefulness and concerns. Internal consistency of the sub-scales was calculated. Plausibility was also checked with qualitative approaches.
Results:
Participants noted their preferences for particular functions and improvements. Patients struggled rating the Likert-scale so that we supported them filling the questionnaire. Usability was rated high (mean: 78/100), as was the usefulness (mean: 9/14). The smartwatch’s design was appealing to most participants. Only a minority (6 persons) felt concerned using the watch. Better usability was associated with better cognition. Observed success and self-rated task comprehension were in agreement for the majority (n=32/40). In different qualitative analyses, participants’ responses were in most cases plausible. Only three participants were completely unaware of their irregular task performance.
Conclusions:
PwD can have positive experiences with smartwatches. The majority of PwD provided valuable information. Developing ATs together with PwD can help to prioritize future development of functional and non-functional features. Clinical Trial: The study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov with the brief title “SAIN_UMR”, NCT05885620.
Citation
