Dementia Sensory Self Care
Providing the experience of self care to women with stage 5+ dementia
My Role
UX Designer, UX researcher, physical product designer, CAD modeller
Time Frame
4 Months
Tools & Methods
Bandsaw. Usability Tests, Lit Review, Task Analysis, Digital ethnography, among others.
Project Recognition
Shown at Design TO 2022 , also presented as an exemplary design solution for people with dementia at the Dementia Labs 2022 conference in Belgium
This project was made for Baycrest Health Sciences as part of a Human-Centered design course. It was an open brief in which we had to identify a target issue within aging with dignity project at Baycrest, and our group decided to focus on self-care in the mid-to-late stages of dementia.
How might we incentivize daily routines and fulfillment for people with people with stage 5+ dementia?
We sought to incentive routine and fulfillment through the cross-sensory self care kit. The project went through several iterations, yet always maintaining the idea of self-care within dementia, and initial identification of the user group needs around this topic.
Main Methods Used
We started off with a project proposal. This step included:
- hypothesis formulation
- preliminary research
- Must/shoulds/coulds
After this we moved to need/requirement identification for target users:
- persona development
- digital ethnography
- literature reviewing
- data analysis/affinity mapping
- journey mapping
- task analysis
In the final stage, we did:
- rapid prototyping
- high fidelity prototyping
- usability testing
- refining past steps (environmental scan and insights)
In the ladder stages, we realized that many aspects of self-care are gender specific (especially for an aging population), so we specified our project for women with mild to late stages of dementia.
For more information /documentation feel free to contact me.