eSticky: An Advanced Remote Reminder System for People with Early Dementia

While the European population is ageing, the number of people with dementia is dramatically rising. With this comes an increased need for products that help affected people to be more independent and able to live in their own home for as long as possible. eSticky addresses this need by providing a sophisticated reminder system that replaces the old-fashioned sticky notes by electronic versions thereof, which can be programmed from near and far in a device-independent manner via the internet and using a standard web browser. For this purpose, a set of low-cost ePaper displays are used, accompanied by a small and unobtrusive base station situated at the user’s home, and supported by a web platform for user management and the authoring and scheduling of the message reminders. The displays can be placed at several strategically useful places in a user’s home, to enable users and/or care persons to place reminders that will, based on the user’s daily routines, most probably be read. A sub-set of displays, named active displays, even enable the user to press a confirmation button to show that he or she has actually read the reminder. The confirmation is then made available to the authors of the particular reminder through the web platform. The system is developed using a user-centred design approach, to take all stakeholders’ wishes and needs into account, in order to come up with a system that is easy to use and provides good service to many people. In this extended version of the paper, besides a detailed description of the technological advancements of the project, both in terms of software and hardware, we provide an insight of the eSticky device design methodology and results from the design user evaluation.