In Austria about 1.2% of the population or a total of ca. 130.000 persons are affected by dementia. The increase of life expectancy will lead to a growing number of people affected in the future. Maintaining mobility can at least help delay the advance of dementia symptoms. Lack of movement is considered to be one of the prevalent risk factors for dementia in the USA and Europe. Encouraging mobility of people with dementia poses risks like getting lost or falling. For this reason technological solutions mostly focus on monitoring and restricting or even inhibiting the mobility of persons with dementia. Often considered stakeholder groups in the design and implementation of technological solutions are care personnel and relatives, making persons with dementia only passive users in the functional chain. Whenever attempts were made to increase independent mobility of people, smartphones or smart watches were used, which are known to be difficult to handle for this user group.

Based on project partners’ products “iToilet” and “fearless”, the feasibility of supporting cognitively impaired people while using the toilet will be explored.

Project Homepage: https://www.aat.tuwien.ac.at/wcbuddy

Team: Paul Panek, Peter Mayer

By means of intelligent recognition of relevant usage actions (fearless, iToilet sensors) customized usage instructions are to be given via the dialog system of iToilet. This should promote the autonomy of the users in a taboo area and relieve the caregiver. The project aims to identify user / supervisor requirements from practice and risk assessment regarding an implementing R & D project and the market outlook through laboratory simulation of appropriate technologies. The project was successfully completed. On June 29, 2020, the successful demonstration of a WCBuddy laboratory prototype took place at the day care center Lichtblick in Steyr. The prototype reacts to user behavior with configurable instructions as an image or video in combination with text and audio. A functional demonstrator has been set up in the laboratory of TUW. The technical, economic and ethical findings developed together with experts are documented in the final report.