Tablet app and Interface for dementia patients:Emotive enrichment and communication

Abstract

As human beings are increasingly living longer, we are faced with more and more people living with some of the diseases that are associated with aging. In this project, we have tried to address the problem faced by caregivers in making sure that the elderly they take care of with diseases like dementia have a much more wholesome experience. We found out that it is common for the elderly to reminisce about life by looking at various types of pictures including pictures of their loved ones. However, the current process of creating a physically bound album that contains all the pictures they would like is not only cumbersome but can not tell us much about the users’ emotional response to it as keeping track of every elderly user as they looking through a physical album is virtually impossible. We proposed the creation of an app that would be able to store and display an album containing all the pictures that our elderly users would find delightful. The app would be able to gauge the emotional response of the users to the pictures displayed by analysing their facial expressions. Through time, the collected data points of the emotional responses of the users to the pictures displayed will be used to find and select pictures that are in accordance to their taste. We were able to create and partially test a prototype of the app. The current app displays pictures scraped from the Internet according to predefined topics. The emotional response of the user is captured using the front-end camera of the tablet. The data is then categorized and stored for later processing.