Designing Access to Music for People with Dementia
Rik Wesselink is a PhD student in the Department Interaction Design. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr.ir. G.D.S. Ludden from the Faculty of Engineering Technology, prof.dr.ir. J.H. Eggen from Eindhoven University and dr.ir. M. Hettinga from Windesheim.
People with dementia can benefit from listening to music in their everyday lives. Music can bring joy or comfort, it can help to relax or activate, and it can help to maintain one’s identity. Unfortunately, as the dementia progresses, using everyday products becomes more difficult, limiting access to music.
The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the field of design for dementia and thereby advance dementia-friendly design that can enrich the lives of people with dementia. We use ‘access to music’ as a design case to explore how to design for people with dementia, focusing on those with mild to moderate dementia living at home. In this thesis, we explore and answer four research questions:
- What are the needs of people with mild to moderate dementia in relation to listening to music in daily life?
- Which design principles are available for design in the context of dementia?
- How to address loss of initiative in design for people with mild to moderate dementia?
- How can adaptive solutions address the variety in needs and capabilities between different people with dementia, as well as the changing needs within each person?
In Chapter 2, we explore research question 1 and identify a gap in the current literature regarding the needs of people with dementia in relation to listening to music in everyday life. In a context mapping study, we work with people with dementia to explore these needs. Our key findings show that people with dementia actively use music for their mental wellbeing, that problems with product use reduce their sense of autonomy and make it difficult to listen to music, that music is sometimes used as a background activity and sometimes as a focused activity, that these types of listening require different functionalities, and that people with dementia need interfaces that are compatible with – and adaptable to – their declining abilities.
Chapter 3 focuses on research question 2. We explore related work describing design recommendations in the context of dementia and synthesise these recommendations into a set of 10 design principles. We reflect on these principles and how they are interconnected and visualise this in the Wheel of Design Principles. We note that the current literature on design for people with dementia lacks recommendations related to loss of initiative.
In Chapter 4, we explore how to design for loss of initiative in dementia. We introduce inviting as a new design principle to address loss of initiative and demonstrate how this can be implemented in a music player that is based on the insights from the previous chapters and this new design principle. We reflect on this design through in-situ evaluations with a high-fidelity prototype in the homes of people with dementia.
In Chapter 5, we build on the previous work and introduce adaptivity to better accommodate the dynamics of dementia. We explore how adaptive invitation design can improve access to music for people with dementia. After updating the design and behaviour of the music player to make it more adaptive and intuitive in use, we evaluate and further refine the adaptive invitation design with people with dementia and their caregivers in an in-situ longitudinal study. We highlight the need for products that can adapt to their users and demonstrate how adaptive invitation design can be used to better meet the dynamic needs of people with dementia.
In Chapter 6, I reflect on the four research questions and our participatory approach. Including people with dementia themselves, working with them in the safety of their own homes, in the context of use, and over an extended period of time, provided valuable and in-depth insights. I discuss the importance of including people with dementia in research and design, but also emphasise the need for researchers to balance the potential benefits of participation with the potential burdens.
Finally, I highlight the main contributions of this doctoral project to both design research and product design. As I see this research as a starting point for future work, I provide suggestions for future research and design work.
