RelivRing: Reliving Social Activities for People with Dementia

Memory loss is one of the most frequent symptoms associated with dementia. Losing the memories of meaningful social activities, such as visits from family, can be confronting not only for the person with dementia, but also for relatives and caretakers. Through an iterative design process involving people with dementia, caretakers and relatives, the RelivRing concept was developed. The RelivRing enables people with dementia to relive the positive experience of visits from relatives. It allows relatives to leave audio messages of their visits, which the person with dementia might have otherwise forgotten. When listening to these messages, the person with dementia can re-experience the positive feeling of the visit. The design is adapted to a person with dementia's cognitive and perceptual abilities following literature research and in-context user studies. With the RelivRing, we aim to maintain and strengthen existing social relations between people with dementia and their relatives.