What's Memory All About?

Abstract

Dementia is, unfortunately, a well-known problem of nowadays, product of a set of generational transformations and a result of better life conditions. There are different kinds of dementia but Alzheimer is the one with predominance. Memory is the key factor in this type of illness and it is nuclear to understand how it is constructed to hypothesise and try to determine how it degenerates. In this chapter, memory structures are presented as a starting point of the research and then through the use of narrative intelligence we devise a method to present small excerpts of patient's history and simultaneously illness progression is evaluated. To do this, a small prototype of MEM+ has been developed, and for its development a participatory design was conducted. With this approach, we aim to devise the right application to be used by the patients themselves and by their caregivers. During this stage of the project special attention was paid to usability issues, and some adaptations made to better the human computer interaction.