This project focuses on contributing to a feeling of connectedness for people in the mid to late stages of dementia living in a nursing home. Feeling connected is still important for people living with dementia. They may suffer from disabilities caused by their disease, losing their memory and ability to make decisions, but there are also things that are not likely to be affected by dementia. A person with dementia stays capable of feeling negative emotions, like fear and pain, and positive emotions, like interest and happiness. Therefore, it is important to contribute to feelings of connectedness, to support emotional well-being.
My framework on connectedness identifies that, based on universal human needs, connectedness can be divided into three types: social, personal and physical connectedness. Fulfilling one or more of the human needs related to a type of connectedness, leads to an increased feeling of being socially, personally or physically connected. People with moderate to severe dementia living in a nursing home, spend of their time in static environments every day. This means that they are surrounded by static objects and non-responsive, apathetic fellow residents. These static environments cause people to become apathetic or restless, which negatively impacts all three types of connectedness and hereby decreases emotional well-being. As the moments where people spend time in static environments happen when care givers are busy with their caring duties, I envision to offer something for these moments that can be used by a resident without the help of care givers and can be used individually, without the need for fellow residents. Therefore, this project focusses on the individual side of connectedness: personal and physical connectedness. The goal is to design a playful product that enables moments of physical and personal connectedness for people in the mid to late stages of dementia, to support emotional well-being in static nursing home environments. To guide the design process, the following interaction vision was created: the interaction should feel like playing with a ladybug: proactive, lively, explorative, enchanting, subtle and open-ended. In an iterative design process, multiple idea directions were explored, and a concept was developed through the creation and evaluation of several prototypes. This resulted in the final concept: Twinkle., Twinkle consists of a sphere, with an interactive dynamic light inside of it. This light can move across the surface of the sphere to proactively try to attract the attention of residents and trigger the curiosity in them to initiate interaction. When an interaction is started, the behavior of the light will change depending on the actions of the user. This way, it allows the user to explore the possibilities of the object. This way, Twinkle provides both cognitive and sensory stimulation to enhance personal and physical connectedness and thereby support emotional well-being for people living with moderate to severe dementia to bring back the twinkle in their eyes.