Challenge
Residents living in assisted living centers with dementia struggle with their lack of short term memory. Lack of short term memory prompts resident to forget their motivations, goals, and to also experience depression. The depression often goes unnoticed due to busy nursing staff within the facility.
Solution
RAEDA is an assistive technological system to help remind, motivate, and accomplish dementia resident’s goals and ambitions. While doing this, the system provides vital data pertaining to happiness levels to nurses. Both AI technology and nursing staff have the ability to create and input reminders specifically for the user.
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A new case of Dementia is diagnosed every 3 seconds.
The total number of new cases of dementia each year worldwide is nearly 10 million, implying 1 new case every 3 seconds. The number of people with dementia is expected to increase to 82 million in 2030 and 152 million in 2050. These statistics along with personal experiences with family members, caught my team's attention. We decided that we will design for people with dementia who are living in assisted living centers.
What is dementia?
A chronic or persistent syndrome of the mental processes caused by brain disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.
Symptoms include:
Short term memory loss
Personality changes
Difficulty in preforming everyday tasks
Interviews
After conducting in depth secondary research on dementia and the struggles that come with it, my team and I reached out to a local assisted living center in which we conducted extensive interviews with both the nursing staff and residents of the facility. When talking to the nursing staff, we wanted to get an outside-in perspective of what the residents go through. We asked them what they saw the biggest challenges that the residents encounter. We also asked them about what are their struggles working at the facility.
Experience Map
As for the residents themselves, we asked them questions pertaining to their daily activities and the struggles that they experience. We created this experience map that displays a typical daily routine for a resident. Included in this map is how the resident is feeling and also the struggles that they deal with throughout their day. The majority of their pain points are attributed to lack of motivation and lack of memory.
Insights
After interviewing both staff and elderly residents at an assisted living center, we affinitized our insights from our interviews. We categorized our insights into five very different categories. Our team had multiple design opportunities to create solutions for. To narrow down our options, we decided to conduct desktop research on each of these topics.
Short term memory is the biggest challenge of dementia
Isolation is very common in assisted living centers
Nurses are unable to identify mood and mental health of residents
Disconnect between residents and nurses when it comes to communication
Disconnect between residents and their families
Problem Statement
Residents living in assisted living centers with dementia have trouble remembering their daily goals and ambitions. This causes them to feel depressed because they don't feel like their normal self anymore. The nursing staff's primary focus is to make sure they are physically healthy, but do not have the time to ask if their happy.
Design Opportunities
Through our desktop research and found out that 14% of residents in assisted living centers experience depression. Their depression is caused by their lack of short term memory and how they don't feel like their normal self anymore. Short term memory can cause them to forget daily goals and ambitions. Many caretakers and nursing staff are unaware of their depressive episodes because they tend to carry out multiple tasks throughout the day and do not have the time to check up on residents one-on-one. This prompted us to ask the questions:
How can we help residents with dementia remember their goals and motivations?
How can we create a system that nurses can monitor emotional states of residents?
Solution Statement
Using AI technology, we created a system in which residents will wear an earpiece that relays audio motivations and reminders that are created and scheduled for them based of their needs. The nursing staff has the ability to view and manually schedule daily reminders for the residents through the application. The earpiece also has the ability to measure their happiness levels and display them through the application for the nursing staff, so they can easily see the status of the resident's mental health.
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Our Solution
Meet RAEDA
Storyboard
Bobby wakes up and the first thing he does is put on his earpiece. It tells him his morning pep talk and reminds him of his daily motivations, getting him in a good mental state for the day.
At 10 o'clock, there is an audio reminder telling Bobby that he has been wanting to loose weight, and that he should attend a physical therapy class to stay in shape.
Around lunch time, Bobby forgets about how he is trying to loose weight and eats a candy bar. The nurse assistant sees what he's eating and realizes that he forgot about his motivation to loose weight.
The nurse decided to manually input a reminder for Bobby around lunchtime about how he should choose to eat a piece of fruit instead of candy.
The next day, Bobby recieves the reminder to eat healthy and decides to eat fruit instead of candy.
Bobby notices that he is starting to habitually remember his motivations thanks to Raeda.
Earpiece
When designing the earpiece it was important to keep the user's experience in mind. By taking their age into account along with user interviews, we wanted our earpiece to be big and comfortable. Something that they can blatantly see in the morning to put on and not to forget to take off before they go to bed at night. The speaker conveys loud pitched audio reminders created for the user by AI technology based on their verbal expressions and words. The sensor on their earpiece has the ability to measure their chemical balances that can alert the nursing staff on how they are feeling.
Lo-fi Wireframes
As we started to design the application, we began by laying out the interface of the application with geometric shapes in order to establish how it will look and how the user will interact with it. we wanted out app to be very functional and straightforward for the nursing staff to use.
Mid-fi Wireframes
Hi-fi Wireframes
Setup
Login
Landing screen
Feedback
Weekly schedule
Social motvies
Health motives
Personal motives
System Flow
This diagram shows how both the application, earpiece, and AI machine learning work together. The earpiece picks up on key words the user says throughout the day. The system then creates daily reminders for them based on what they say and the expressions they make. The earpiece also has the ability to monitor the users "happy" chemicals that affect their personality. The nursing staff has the ability to manually input motivations and reminders throughout the day through the application.
Thank you!
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My Contributions
Conducted primary and secondary research, experience map, insight development, and systems diagram.
Team
Sam Cadan, Rick Hewitt, Keaton Huff, Rachel Tarulli
Timeframe
10 Weeks