The combination of technology and dementia has been Brankaert's field even since he graduated from the very department where he is now works part time as an Assistant Professor. In 2015 he gained his doctorate at Industrial Design for work that involved designing the Welthuis Compass, a simple navigation system for people with dementia.

To bachelor's students he teaches the course ‘Design with and for multiple stakeholders’, which focuses on design in complex situations like healthcare, where it pays to bear in mind not only the end user but others, too. “Because you are dealing with family members, nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, the product's maker, the list goes on,” says Brankaert. “All the stakeholders play a different role and they all impact each other. A partner I'm currently working with, for example, is the PSV stadium. We are looking at how we can design a dementia-friendly stadium.”

Not too old to learn

Designing with people with dementia in mind, says Brankaert, gives rise to ‘warm technology’. “This is user-friendly and not stigmatizing.” A good example of ‘warm technology’ stems from the research group Systemic Change in which he is supervising doctoral candidate Myrte Thoolen. Together with others, they designed Living Moments, a device for converting almost automatically digital messages into a printed card, sound and images.

“Living Moments has a printer that produces a paper postcard carrying a message and photo. The user can then insert this into the system in order to hear and see extra information. The person with dementia then has the option of giving a response very simply, in the form of a smiley or a spoken message. What's particularly nice is that this really does increase the person's number of contact moments and it seems we can demonstrate that participants in the current study still have the ability to learn to operate the device.” Living moments will be entered in the TU/e Contest.