Designing a Mixed Reality Cognitive Orthosis to Support Independence of Older Adults from the Dementia Continuum

The societal and economic impacts of people living with dementia are significant. A possibility to mitigate these impacts are to support their independence at home through cognitive orthosis. Mixed-reality headsets are an emerging technology that come with technological benefits that could be useful in this context. The objective of this research is to propose a first design for a mixed-reality headset cognitive orthosis software to support independence at home of this population. The software architecture is defined as part of a user centred design methodology. The software has been developed during six iterations, each concluded by expert or cognitive walkthrough evaluations, with eight sessions in total. The software has been designed around the following five concepts: (1) finite state machine; (2) transitions between assistances; (3) assistances; (4) interaction surfaces; (5) scenarios. Five themes emerged from the evaluations: (1) gradation; (2) give the control to the user; (3) attract the user's attention; (4) discoverability; (5) interactions. Several opportunities of development are discussed, including usability testing with the population.