The future of dementia care

It is ethical and desirable to design for personalised dementia care since each person with dementia is unique; it is also feasible and viable to do so thanks to the development of IoT, AI and big data. In the future, design for personalised dementia care is not limited to the available time and resource of professional designers anymore. As defined by Herbert Simon, “design” is about changing existing situations into preferred ones, hence the design outcome can take many forms, and everyone can design. It has been found that a personalised design for people with dementia could be simple yet effective.

The Know-me toolkit guides you to think about what aspects of dementia care could be personalised while giving you autonomy about your own design. There are different ways of designing for personalised dementia care. For example, you could design something specifically for a person with dementia, or you could customize an existing product or service for this person. You could also think about a modular design where you can customize it depending on which person with dementia it interacts with. Or even better, the design could be intelligent and able to customize itself.

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Gubing Wang
Creator of the Know-me toolkit