Inclusive Design

People with dementia are a diverse group of people. Not only do they differ in age, sex, and ethnicity: Their varying cognitive abilities and skills make them even more diverse. This shows how important it is to design a product such as ours with inclusivity in mind. We performed a small study to identify common characteristics of people with dementia that may influence their abilities of interacting with the product. 

A first step into identifying these characteristics was made through looking at the risk factors of developing dementia. According to 2020 Alzheimer's disease facts and figures published by the Alzheimer's Association, age, genetics, and family history are the three greatest risk factors of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease. Age appears to be the largest factor: 3% of people age 65-74 have Alzheimer's dementia, while 32% of people age 85 and up have this disease. 

With age, there is also a decrease in sensory skills. Vision and hearing are two of the most common declines. WHO expects to see an increase in people acquiring vision inpairments as they age. For people over 60 years old, WHO reports that over 25% of people are affected by disabling hearing loss.

This shows that there is a clear need that products developed for this demographic must be created with accessibility in mind: We need to ensure that people with disabilities can use the products as well as people without disabilities. For us, this concretely means that we can not develop a product that relies solely on eyesight or hearing. 

For the vision impaired, this is easily solved by using sounds. MiRo can cue the user into taking certain actions by barking, whining, beeping, and yapping, for example. One weak point of using the MiRo with the vision impaired is that it is fairly small. Depending on the severity of the user's sight loss, MiRo might not be visible enough to use. For this reason we would like to explore different technologies in our future work, perform experiments with a physical leash connecting the user to the robot, and perhaps find an animal robot that is large enough for this purpose. 

We can solve some problems that arise for the vision impaired by making use of sounds. But relying on sounds becomes a hurdle for the hearing impaired. This is most important when giving feedback to the user when they are on their walk. A distracted user that cannot clearly hear the sounds that MiRo makes is not likely to respond to feedback in this way. To mitigate this, we envision the user wearing a wristband. The wristband symbolizes the leash that is connected to MiRo. When the user gets distracted and deviates from the route too far, MiRo "tugs" on the leash. The wristband vibrates. Through this tangible feedback, we hope to snap the user out of their distraction, and remember that they are on a walk with MiRo. 

Of course, the conclusions we draw above are not verifiable unless we test them with a diverse group of users. Since the scope of this project was limited, we were not able to user test our product with a group as large as we would have wanted to. However, we did test the product with a person who is hard of hearing.