Rens Brankaert

• MSc
• Researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology

Healthcare technologies are often considered a solution for better and more efficient dementia care; however, these technologies are frequently abandoned over time. Improving user acceptance is vital to increasing the use of healthcare technology by care professionals, but achieving this attitude change is a complex challenge. Learning Communities...

The transition from home to formal residential care is described as stressful and emotionally difficult for people with dementia and their informal caregivers. While HCI research investigated how technology supports people with dementia at home or in formal care, there still is a need to understand how technology can support care transitions. This...

Increasingly, Design Thinking's influence reaches beyond the confines of traditional design disciplines and expands its role in connecting domains and integrating resources. This study focused on the changing role of design researchers involved in interdisciplinary research projects, following a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach. The research...

Dance exercises offer recreational and social activities that engage people with dementia in physical exercise to increase fitness and cognitive functioning. However, there is limited research on how technology supports people with dementia to initiate and engage in music-supported dance exercises at home. We present Switch2Move: a TV-based home sy...

Dementia is a growing societal challenge putting pressure on care systems across Europe. Providing supporting technology for people living with dementia, referring to both people with dementia and their caregivers, is an important strategy to alleviate pressure. In this paper, we present lessons learned from the Interreg NWE Project Certification-D...

This book gathers the revised and selected contributions to the 6th Dementia Lab Conference, D-Lab 2022, held on September 20-22, 2022, in Leuven. It describes original and innovative research on how design can contribute to the quality of life of people with dementia, their loved ones, and caregivers. The papers highlight the value of participatio...

Due to dementia, people lose the ability to deal with complex tasks such as cooking. We can support this group by designing new tools to keep them active and enhance their feeling of self-worth. Previous studies have focused on step-by-step guidance for people with dementia using innovative technology, which is often too complicated to learn and se...

One of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century is the aging population. This is reflected by the growing group of people living with dementia. Even though awareness of dementia is growing, the gap between awareness and understanding still causes stigmatization. This stigma pervades discourse regarding dementia and threatens wellbein...

Engaging people with dementia in the design of technology is increasingly gaining more attention—and rightfully so. Yet to be sensitive and responsive to the variety of participants with dementia in different contexts and phases of a design process can be challenging. In this case-study, we applied retrospective reporting to elicit information on t...

Researchers are investigating how soundscapes can reduce agitation and contribute to the well-being of people with dementia. We advance this research by exploring further how to incorporate the personal background and preferences of individuals with dementia in soundscapes to evoke storytelling and meaningful activity in their everyday surroundings...

People with dementia and their caregivers aging in place have expressed the need for social, emotional, and recreational interventions at home. Listening to everyday sounds evokes memories and provides conversational cues to support social relations and elicit emotional responses for people with dementia. However, research has yet to explore how th...

Increasingly, Design Thinking has influence beyond the confines of traditional design disciplines and expands its’ role in connecting domains and integrating resources. This study focusses on the changing role of design researchers involved in interdisciplinary research projects, following a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach. The research cont...

Research in HCI is increasingly investigating the role of technology in supporting meaningful and social activities to enhance the lived experiences of people with dementia. However, to further enrich the daily experiences in care, more insight is needed into how technology can directly promote social participation and pleasurable experiences in ev...

Onderzoekers bestuderen de wereld zoals die is. Ontwerpers willen de wereld veranderen. Applied design research is een vorm van praktijkgericht onderzoek waarin beide benaderingen worden geïntegreerd, om nieuwe kennis op te doen én om praktische oplossingen te ontwikkelen. Maar hoe doe je dat, aangezien ontwerpen en onderzoeken sterk verschillen en...

Smartphone technologies can support older adults in their daily lives as they age in place at home. However, they may struggle to use these technologies which impacts acceptance, adoption, and sustainable use. Peer to peer community learning has the potential to support older adults to learn using (smartphone) technologies. This paper studies such...

Maintaining social participation in late life is an important component of general well-being. For people with dementia, participating in social interactions may become increasingly challenging with the progression of the condition. Social technologies can potentially support and empower them in this setting, yet there is a need to get a comprehens...

As dementia progresses, it often prompts changes to living arrangements and care provision as people with dementia are required to move from their home environment into long-term care. Over time, family members may lose touch with the everyday lives of people with dementia and no longer share the everyday moments that preserve identity and social c...

People with memory challenges may experience a sense of losing themselves or ‘unbecoming a self’, preserving their personhood ensures increased quality of life. This paper explores a design for one approach to create a personal design tailored to our participants Adele, Bruce, and Chris. In collaboration with these three participants, an audio play...

People with dementia living at home experience difficulties in participating in social interactions, while staying in contact with family adds quality to their lived experience. Initiating communication can be challenging for family, since there is a natural disparity between their life patterns and those of people with dementia. In this paper, we...

The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.

Digital Behavior Change Interventions (DBCI) have a pivotal role in reducing lifestyle-related illness, absenteeism, and healthcare costs. Current challenges in designing DBCI are appropriately tailoring interventions and finding new forms of delivery. In this exploratory work, we present the design and evaluation of Tweak, a cloud-based health pro...

Living labs are an extremely attractive open innovation landscape for collaborative research and development activities targeting the complexity of today’s societal challenges. However, although there is plenty of support for collaboration, we still lack clear guidelines to direct transdisciplinary stakeholder networks of academics and practitioner...

This book gathers revised and selected contributions to the 5th Dementia Lab Conference, D-Lab 2021, organized online on January 18-28, 2021, from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, Canada. It describes original strategies in which design or creative methods have been shown to uncover, support and enhance the abilities of people...

Music and familiar everyday sounds can be meaningful for people with dementia by providing benefits such as evoking memories and emotions or prompting social interactions with caregivers or relatives. Motivated by this potential, researchers and designers are investigating how to leverage these beneficial effects of sound in care environments throu...

Incidences of age-related diseases such as dementia are increasing. Attention is shifting to living well with dementia, and how non-pharmacological interventions such as technology can play an important role to support this. However, there are still many challenges ahead. Technology is often devised without a full consideration of the target user g...

The number of people living with dementia is increasing rapidly and puts pressure on our society. An increasing body of evidence suggests that listening to music and engaging with systems that allow you to do this can be beneficial in dementia care. Building on a growing interest in HCI for designing technology for dementia, this chapter will focus...

A higher proportion of the population, than ever before, is in the older age range. Diseases and conditions such as dementia, where old age is a considerable risk factor, are likely to increase. The increased incidences of dementia have extensive social and economic implications and will increase stress on existing healthcare systems and social str...

Design and HCI in the context of dementia share current research and practices in relation to working for and with people living with dementia. In this chapter, we will revisit the contributions to the book and see how they reflect inclusive practices in HCI and design. The book is divided into four sections covering Inclusion and recognition, Desi...

Motivated by the successes of music in dementia, researchers and designers in HCI are exploring the potential benefits of non-musical sounds from everyday life for people with dementia. Research in the field of building acoustics and psychology is suggesting that re-presenting everyday sounds as soundscapes in the care space can influence emotional...

Research in design and HCI is investigating the role of design interventions in adding value to the quality of life of people with dementia. However, the sustainable use of design interventions in care environments remains challenging due to the complex values and needs of all involved stakeholders. In this paper, we present the results of two work...

There has been a growing interest in designing interactive media experiences in residential dementia care. Although research in HCI and dementia have shown that person-centered design yields positive results, little is known about designing media experiences in shared care spaces. To investigate this, we designed AmbientEcho, an interactive system...

The representation of sounds derived from everyday life can be beneficial for people with dementia by evoking memories and emotional responses. Despite this potential, integrating sound and sound-based interventions in care facilities has not received much research attention. In this paper, we present the findings from a field study that explored t...

Engaging in participatory research in HCI raises numerous ethical complexities such as consent, researcher relationships, and participant compensation. Doing HCI work in the area of dementia amplifies these issues, and researchers in this area are modelling ethical stances to ensure researcher-participant relationships focus on meaningful engagemen...

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...

People with dementia often experience a lack of social engagement after moving from the home environment into long-term care. Professional caregivers aim to build social relations with residents in dementia care homes to empower and socially include them during everyday care. However, the natural imbalance between the caregiver and the cared-for po...

Background: There is increasing interest in the role that technology can play in improving the vitality of knowledge workers. A promising and widely adopted strategy to attain this goal is to reduce sedentary behavior (SB) and increase physical activity (PA). In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art SB and PA interventions using technology in...

People identify with their hobbies often which stimulate physical activity and participation in social activities, which in turn relate to higher levels of subjective well-being. Hobbies are potentially a powerful tool for design; however, it is unclear how to take hobbies into the design process for example to increase engagement. By creating and...

Old age is currently the greatest risk factor for developing dementia. Since older people make up a larger portion of the population than ever before, the resulting increase in the incidence of dementia presents a major challenge for society. Dementia is complex and multifaceted and impacts not only the person with the diagnosis but also those cari...

Dementia is increasingly becoming a societal challenge worldwide. In order to address the needs of people living with dementia through design, it is important to develop products and services in collaboration with them. For this study, a co-design approach was used to involve people with dementia throughout the design process. With them we aim to f...

Understanding your user's daily life and interests is essential in providing insights that can be leveraged to define new design opportunities. However, when designing for older adults, this can be challenging because, users may find it complicated to express themselves; designers may have difficulties to take their perspective and empathize with t...

Design and research studies regarding the impact of music on the wellbeing of people living with advanced dementia are ongoing. Many of these focus on reminiscence and the use of familiar songs, music and instruments. However, fewer studies have explored the creative and improvisational aspects of music making with people living with advanced demen...

Participatory approaches are used to design interactive systems, services and products to improve their impact and usability. However, these approaches are not always suitable for people with cognitive limitations such as dementia. This workshop will focus on participatory approaches for working with people living with dementia, challenge assumptio...

There has been an increased interest in researching the beneficial effects of everyday sounds, other than music on people with dementia. However, to turn this potential into concrete design applications, a qualitative understanding of how people engage with sound is needed. This paper presents the outcomes of three workshops, exploring the personal...

We investigated how a user interface could support people with dementia (PwD) in having personal and direct access to a music-playing device. Despite a growing interest in designing technology for people with dementia, personal and direct access to systems are not always considered. We introduce Sentic (Figure 1), an interface concept of a music pl...

Since its establishment in 2009 the Intelligent Lighting Institute of Eindhoven University of Technology has been conducting research with users in living labs. This publication provides an overview of the various Living Light Labs, our achievements and the key learnings we gained over the years. These learnings cover requirements on the technical...

With the rise of chronic diseases as the number one cause of death and disability among urban populations, it has become increasingly important to design for healthy environments. There is, however, a lack of interdisciplinary approaches and solutions to improve health and well-being through urban planning and design. This case study offers an HCI...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Dementia Lab Conference, D-Lab 2019, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in October 2019. The 12 full and 7 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: inclusion & participation, technology & ex...

Prolonged sitting time in adults has become a major societal issue with far-reaching health, economic, and social consequences. The objective of this study is to reduce sedentary behaviour in office workers by integrating physical activity with work. In this case study, we present Workwalk, a concept to encourage and facilitate office workers to ha...

Increasingly, HCI researchers are recognizing the challenges and opportunities of designing with and for people living with dementia. Recent critiques have highlighted the limited ways people with dementia are engaged in the research and design process. The second CHI HCIxDementia workshop will focus on engagement with and by people living with dem...

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of the prototype of FLOW, a portable exercise platform that aims at aiding sedentary behavior among elderly people by offering them a more active sitting experience in their daily routines. We designed FLOW based on three iterations, revolving technology implementation, interaction design, and user exp...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a Living Lab protocol to evaluate interventions for people with dementia in context. The number of people with dementia is continuously growing, resulting in all kinds of societal challenges. As there is no cure for the diseases today, there is a need to look at alternative ways to combat these chal...

The number of people with dementia is increasing rapidly. As a result, care has to be extended towards the home context. This increases the burden on both informal caregivers and persons affected by dementia. To support these people more effectively, technology could play an important role. However, it proves to be challenging to involve them in us...

Assistive technology can play an important role in supporting people with dementia and their caregivers. For this study a smartphone interface with new functionalities is evaluated in context. This evaluation aimed at how elderly affected by dementia and their caregivers used it and how they experienced using such a device. In this study ten couple...

Purpose: Due to the aging population, dementia is an increasingly growing societal issue. Consequently, informal caregivers are forced to provide care in the home over a longer period of time. Especially with dementia, disturbed sleep patterns are often a tipping point for moving a person into an elder care facility. To address this challenge, a hi...

In Europe we face an aging society with a growing number of people suffering from dementia. This challenge we face as a society, because current healthcare systems are not ready for such an increase. In this paper we propose a new design process to find new opportunity areas using an interactive experience flow based on the dementia care chain. Thi...