Supporting situation awareness of dementia patients in outdoor environments

Abstract

Engagement in cognitively stimulating activities is today among the most effective measures against the decline of cognitive abilities due to dementing disorders. Outdoor and social activities are cognitively demanding and provide emotional support at the same time. Alzheimer's disease as the most frequent cause of the dementia syndrome, however, early effects skills for spatial orientation while it simultaneously impedes planning and error compensation abilities. These abilities are necessary to overcome disorientation in unfamiliar environments. People with dementia progressively limit their life-space and diversity of activities in reaction to growing security concerns. It is desirable to provide appropriate guidance in disoriented situations to avoid dangers, while not, in addition, complicating normal mobility in order to maintain a person's life-space, activity spectrum and cognitive health. Such guidance system has to be situation-aware and adaptive. Consequently, the mobility behavior of a patient must be modeled. In addition, the system must be able to learn and detect states of disorientation. In this paper we describe a pilot study to collect mobility data from dementia patients. Furthermore, we examine the collected data's quality and investigate how to detect states of disorientation within the data.