Researchers from the Expertise Center for Dementia & Technology were present again at the annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, hosted in Hamburg, Germany from April 23-28. The ACM CHI Conference is the largest international conference in the field of human-computer interaction.
Yvon Ruitenburg presented the Late-Breaking Work paper: ‘Happje: Stimulating Collaborative Cooking for People with Dementia’. This paper describes the thirteen iterative prototypes made and evaluated with people with dementia and formulates lessons learned and insights from the design process. This paper concluded how intuitive and step-by-step instructions and collaborative task execution can effectively reduce the perceived intimidation of cooking for people with dementia. The photo on the right demonstrates the final design: Happje.
Course & Workshop orginazed by the ECDT
Maarten Houben, Minha Lee, and Rens Brankaert, with colleagues Kellie Morrissey (University of Limerick) and Sarah Foley (University College Cork), instructed the course: ‘HCI Research in Sensitive Settings: Lessons Learned from Technology Design and Ethical Challenges in Dementia’. This course offered concrete guidelines for HCI research in sensitive settings based on previous research experiences in dementia. We shared how these lessons learned apply in sensitive settings regarding how designing for and with people with dementia has general implications for design and computing. First, the course attendees received real-world insights on designing technologies in sensitive settings by analyzing example cases from academia and industry. Next, the participants learned about practical ethical conduct with stakeholders through hands-on exercises, such as facilitating informed consent and modifying common co-design activities for sensitive contexts.
The course description is published in the CHI2023 Extended Abstracts proceedings: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3544549.3574193
After the course, we also hosted a network lunch with the course attendees and other researchers working in the context of dementia, such as Jenny Waycott (University of Melbourne), Diego Muñoz (Swinburne University of Technology), Sonja Pedell (Swinburne University of Technology), Gubing Wang (Tilburg University) and others. This networking lunch was a nice way to bring together HCI researchers working in the context of dementia to have meaningful discussion and exchange ideas. We look forward to future collaborations and to further build this international network!
Lastly, Minha Lee was involved in organizing the workshop ‘CUI@CHI: Inclusive Design of CUIs Across Modalities and Mobilities’ to engage the CHI community about inclusive practices of speech-based systems for marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as people with dementia. Also during this workshop, Yvon Ruitenburg presented her work on ‘Adjusting Conversational User Interfaces to fit Communication Needs of People with Dementia’ and Rucha Khot presented her work ‘Robots for Temporal Experiences: Co-Designing with People with Dementia’.
The workshop description is published in the CHI2023 Extended Abstracts proceedings: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3573820
At ECDT, we are proud to have been able to share our work on dementia and technology with the international research community and we will continue our efforts to research and develop Warm Technology for people with dementia.