Designing for People with Dementia - MinD project
This EU-funded project aims to help people with dementia engage in social contexts to improve psychosocial wellbeing. People who are affected by Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia often face cognitive, behavioural and psychosocial difficulties, including impairment and degeneration of memory and of perceptions of identity. In a social context, this can cause difficulties of recognizing, relating to and empathising with other people. These difficulties often pose a challenge for engaging socially, reinforcing their effects and reducing personal well-being.
During this four-year project, which will run until February 2020, the partners will work together to design and create a number of experiential prototypes to support people with dementia. These will cover
- designing to help with personal difficulties with social interaction and
- designing the environment to help with social engagement.
In these two contexts, we will study how personal, wearable designs can help mediate perceptions of identity and emotion management; and how environmental aspects can reduce feelings of information overload and instill feelings of self-empowerment and control.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHT) is a partner in this exciting new 4 year programme with European and Australian partners. MindTech’s Tom Dening and Mike Craven are running the NHT end of the programme along with consultant clinical psychologist & neuropsychologist Dons Coleston and MindTech’s patient and public involvement team, all based at the Institute of Mental Health, University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus.
For more information, please go to the MinD project website at www.designingfordementia.eu