Using Personas and Daily Activity Maps to Design Care Companion Robots for People with Dementia

The need to care for People With Dementia (PWD) is a growing healthcare challenge. Diminishing human caregiver resources and rapidly increasing costs can potentially be addressed by using emerging technologies such as care companion robots (CCRs). Our team undertook a project to design and develop a CCR for PWD using the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach. However, designing a robot (and associated technology) that can appropriately respond to a PWD’s wide range of triggers and emotions requires a deep empathetic understanding of the PWD. A dearth of information regarding the design of effective Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) specific to PWD led our team to explore the use of Personas and Daily Activity Maps (PDAMs) to facilitate the development of design requirements for the CCR. Before proceeding with design activities, we plan to validate the efficacy of our PDAMs with an expert panel using the team’s Persona Perception Survey.