FIT: INDEPENDENT WITH DEMENTIA

For people with dementia and their caregivers there are many support tools available that can help to keep living independently at home. As it turns out, however, it’s still difficult to define which aid yields good results in which situation, and how fitting packages can be compiled in different situations. The consortium partners of FIT work on mapping support tools and research how they can be better attuned to the demands for aid by people confronted with dementia.

First project results: Seeing the person with dementia
The booklet “Seeing the person with Dementia” describes what types of needs people with dementia may have when it comes to aid in living at home. Important here is the conclusion that people with dementia often don’t realize they may have demands, and that they need help to articulate them. The research showed that the caregiver often acts as “demand translator.” The publication can be downloaded here.

Living Lab: Gooi and Vechtstreek
As dementia-friendly region, the Gooi and Vechtstreek actively contributes to the project FIT. Care facilities, interest groups and businesses from the region Gooi and Vechtstreek participate in the project, and in the coming months the region will be a living lab in which people with dementia living at home are invited to participate in the research. They will be testing the prototypes of the “decision aid.”

Methodology
Knowledge and research methods from the creative industry and the social and medical sciences are combined and lead to surprising new methodologies. People with dementia are central in this and are involved in every phase of the project. They share their experiences and test the proposed solutions. The involvement of businesses from the creative industry ensures that the current products and services will be improved and that new product/service combinations and partnerships emerge for better solutions. The partnership with the region Gooi and Vechtstreek makes it possible to actually deliver and test the custom-selected aid on people with dementia. The knowledge and experiences gained through this research were collected and described in the publication Care for design in Care. Download it here.

Activities FIT

• Research which aid people with dementia themselves find important to be able to live at home, and display this in patient journeys.
• Take stock of and categorize the supply of support tools.
• Develop a method to evaluate products and services on their “appropriateness” for behavior, phase and situation, and on their impact on actually enabling people to live at home longer.
• Research how personalized packages of products and services can be offered through local governments and care facilities.
• Educate and train professionals of the participating care facilities.
• Describe design principles and guidelines for products and services that effectively help people with dementia to live at home longer.
• Draft design recommendations for platforms that can function as intermediaries.
• For more informatio, check the website: http://www.digitallifecentre.nl/projecten/fit (Dutch).

FIT emerged from Create Health: a cross-over program in which the Top Sectors Creative Industry and Life Sciences & Health work together on innovation. In 2015, the call “Prolonged independence with dementia” emerged from the collaboration, from which FIT was selected as one of the two so-called cross-over projects.