Challenges and Opportunities for Mobile Phone Use in Dementia
This project examines challenges with mobile phone use and evaluations of emerging assistive technologies to support mobile phone use for people with dementia.
General Mobile Phone Use
In this study we conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with fourteen people with mild to moderate dementia. Our analysis yields insights into mobile phone use by people with mild to moderate dementia, challenges they experience with mobile phone use, and their ideas to address these challenges. Based on these findings, we discuss design opportunities to help achieve more accessible and supportive technology use for people with dementia. Our work opens up new opportunities for the design of systems focused on augmenting and enhancing the abilities of people with dementia [Dixon et al., 2022].
Action Blocks and Action Shortcuts
We conducted a two-week diary study with three people with mild dementia to investigate their experiences with and perceptions of user interface shortcuts and control panes. Findings from this study demonstrate the potential of user interface shortcuts and control panes to address specific mobile phone accessibility challenges people with mild dementia experience. This work provides a technical contribution in the form of control panes for mobile phones, as well as design considerations to improve the viability of mobile phone shortcuts and controls panes as future assistive technology for individuals with diverse cognitive abilities.
Publications
Emma Dixon, Rain Michaels, Xiang Xiao, Yu Zhong, Patrick Clary, Ajit Narayanan, Robin N. Brewer, and Amanda Lazar. 2022. Mobile Phone Use by People with Mild to Moderate Dementia: Uncovering Challenges and Identifying Opportunities. In Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 1–16.
Emma Dixon, Xiang Xiao, Rain Michaels, Yu Zhong, Ajit Narayanan,
and Erin Buehler. 2024. Investigating the Potential of User Interface
Shortcuts and Control Panes to Support Mobile Phone Use by People
with Mild Dementia – a Diary Study. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24).