Designing for older people with cognitive and affective disorders

Summary Knowledge of the design criteria for specific physical environments for elderly people with dementia, together with medical and pharmacological research studies is a very important scientific target with therapeutical implications for cognitive and affective disorders. Safety, comfort and utility are major concerns for the elderly, especially those who have developed perceptual or other mental deficits. Yet designing environments that are safe and respectful of them is a very complicated task. Here we approach that task simultaneously from two distinctly separate vantage points. The first is from the laboratory, involving the psychophysics of human performance, namely, the parameters of the senses, vision, touch and of cognitive and motor performance which can be used to predict accidents in specific settings. The second one is the accident reconstruction: after accidents occur, they are analyzed to find out which aspects of the person interacted with which aspects of the environment to cause the trip or fall or crash. Data from both of these sources can be used to elevate the standards of safety. Research on visual perception, motor activity, orientation and other relevant human functions often cannot be generalized to the field from the psychophysical laboratory. It is often necessary to perform the relevant experimentation in the field where the research setting is more representative of the lives of the patients and the dangers to them. It is necessary to develop standardized research settings such as the Alzheimer's garden. Such settings should, first, be mathematically modeled along the dimensions of interest in concert with the collection of data which can be used to test, validate and extend the model and thus the utility of the setting. Separate sub-models can eventually be combined into larger models.