Designing user interfaces of assistive technology for people living with dementia: a systematic scoping review

Assistive technologies may have an important role in fulfilling unmet needs and increasing quality of life for people living with dementia. The type and design of user interfaces (e.g. touchscreen and voice activation) may impact how people with dementia use these technologies. We aimed to understand which types of user interfaces have been developed for this population, how interfaces are chosen, how their effectiveness is tested and what recommendations there are for optimizing interface design for people with dementia. This systematic scoping review summarized findings from 87 journal articles. Two-thirds of included studies incorporated codesign. Very few (14%) experimentally tested the effectiveness of a user interface, and many lacked ecological validity (52%). Common recommendations for user interface design included tailoring the interface to the user, providing multiple modalities, and incorporating principles of universal design. Training users on how to interface with the technology may not be beneficial for devices that are intended to be used entirely independently by a person living with dementia. Instead, designers should focus on harnessing retained or existing skills so that interaction is intuitive. More research is needed that directly compares different interface options to each other to gain evidence of what is most useful for people with dementia, as well as technology development that is deeply and meaningfully grounded in the lived experiences, values, preferences and priorities of people living with dementia.