Joël Vogt

Putting dementia into context: a selective literature review of assistive applications for users with dementia and their caregivers

People with dementia face a decline of their cognitive functions, including memory impairment and difficulty to orient in time and space. Assistive applications can ease the effects of dementia by assuming and supporting impaired functions. Context-awareness is an accepted paradigm for assistive applications. It enables interactive systems to react appropriately to situations that occur during daily routines of people with dementia. However, there currently is no recommended framework to view symptoms of dementia in terms of context and context-awareness. The aim of this paper is to inform designers in the early design stages of assistive applications how requirements and needs of people with dementia can be represented in a context-aware application. Based on a systematic literature review, we elicit which context types are linked to the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers and how they are used in existing assistive applications in dementia care. Our focus is on applications evaluated and assessed with people with dementia. We also classify these assistive applications by the offered context-aware services. We observe that these should not be limited within the realm of the local residence; context types that are valuable in-house can, to a certain extent, also be leveraged outside a local residence. We believe the proposed framework is a tool for application builders and interface designers to accomplish an informed design of systems for people with dementia.

Dazed and confused considered normal: an approach to create interactive systems for people with dementia

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patients social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system.

Towards an SMS-based social network for health workers in rural areas in Myanmar

Seventy percent of the population in Myanmar lives in rural areas. Although health workers are adequately trained, they are overburdened due to understaffing and insufficient supplies. Literature confirms that information and communication technologies can extend the reach of healthcare. In this paper, we present an SMS-based social network that aims to help health workers to interact with other medical professionals through topic-based message delivery. Topics describe interests of users and the content of message. A message is delivered by matching message content with user interests. Users describe topics as ICD-10 codes, a comprehensive medical taxonomy. In this ICD-10 coded SMS, a set of prearranged codes provides a common language for users to send structured information that fits inside an SMS.

Entwicklung einer Storyboard Language für Personen mit leichter Demenz

In einem Forschungsprojekt der Universitäten Hasselt, Belgien, und Fribourg, Schweiz, wird untersucht, wie Patienten mit leichter Demenz und ihre Betreuer (Arzt, Pflegepersonal, Angehörige) mit mobilen Technologien adäquat unterstützt werden können. Besonderer Wert wird auf die Gestaltung der Benutzerschnittstellen gelegt. Mithilfe einer Storyboard Language gelingt es, wichtige Kontexttypen wie Aktivität, Identität, Ort oder Zeit aus unterschiedlichen Episoden zu extrahieren und als Grundlage für kontextbasierte Demenz-Dienste zu verwenden.

A Proposal for the Next Generation of Courier Delivery and Storage in the Shared Economy

In the past few months we increasingly read and discussed about blockchain technologies, especially in conjunction with the Internet of Things. Among other things, we thereby asked the following questions: Why exactly do we need blockchain technologies? Which existing services can be improved with blockchain technologies and what are the limitations of blockchain technologies? Where does the blockchain fit in the Internet of Things technology stack? We set out to write this paper, and try to answer these questions by using the Internet of Postal Things as case study. Our focus is the smart mailbox, a general purpose mailbox, that can be shared, monitored, and monetized using Internet of Things and blockchain technologies. Blockchain technologies provide a distributed shared ledger in a heterogeneous environment and thus the link in the Internet of Things technology stack for proof and trust. However, blockchain technologies are not to render existing database and security solutions irrelevant. As we understand, blockchain technologies are another step, albeit a crucial one, in an ever more decentralized and democratic Internet of People and Things.

Mobile competence network for community health workers in rural Myanmar: a supportive information system that facilitates the improvement of health services.

The goal of this project is the development of international cooperation for fostering solutions to provide better access to basic healthcare services.