How Design Is Helping People With Dementia Find Their Way Around

The finding that Alzheimer's especially is associated with a severe decline in navigational skills has prompted scientists to redesign environments using virtual reality (VR) and other modern methods to help people with dementia, reports The Guardian . "There's an overlap between the brain regions affected in the early stages of Alzheimer's and the areas important for spatial navigation, including the entorhinal cortex of the temporal lobe," says Bournemouth University's Jan Wiener. He thinks VR is perfect for the redesign, given the impracticality of building a care or residential setting, measuring how people with dementia perform, and then reworking it a few months later. "VR enables us to simulate unfamiliar home environments and then simply change features and structures systematically, whether it's the layout of corridors, the number of intersections, or the types of landmark," Wiener says. Experiments with virtual environments such as care communities have demonstrated that older participants are slower at learning routes than young adults, because they make more mistakes and require more repetitions. This also hints at the possibility that older adults use different strategies when they learn new routes, noting salient landmarks more than turns and intersections. Bournemouth's Vladislava Segen says gaze behavior also is helping such research. "Older healthy adults tend to make more use of external information, for instance windows and walls," he notes. "But younger participants tend to look at the spatial arrangements of objects within a room, as well as flicking back and forth to external cues."