What if spouses and professional caregivers could experience the emotional distress, confusion, and cognitive challenges facing people with dementia ?

The DemSim project is about the design and construction of a desktop-sized multi-sensorial space allowing us to experiment with ways to expose people without dementia to a state of cognitive overload.

While still in its infancy the project aims to break all the established standards considered crucial for successful interface and interaction design. By means of tactile, visual, proprioceptive, auditory and vestibular stimulation we will systematically seek to push the user towards a state of cognitive overload, amnesia, lack of concentration and Apraxia. In effect making even the most simple tasks/puzzle seem almost impossible to solve. Sessions of puzzle solving while under sensory stimulation are embedded as part of a larger dialogue between therapist and ‘user’ of the simulator altogether raising the level of empathy through actual experience rather than abstract discussion of what it may feel like to suffer from dementia. The art of the different stimulations are designed inspired on self-reported experiences from people with Alzheimer dementia. After the puzzle solving the user has to respond to questions inspired from the cognitive test MOCA.

Credits

Project by: Tomas Sokoler (ITU)

Photo by: Jonas Holsbæk