Prompting people with dementia to carry out tasks: What works and why?

This two-year project aims to investigate in detail how prompting can help to guide people with dementia through tasks independently in a domestic setting. Four formats of prompt (text, audio, video and picture) are being compared with each other during domestic user-testing visits, to establish the relative strengths and weaknesses of each format. The importance of providing overall task context at each step, and ways of manual or automatic forwarding to the next instruction, will also be explored. Early findings from user testing have shown that comparable text or audio prompts are more effective means of prompting than picture or video prompts, and that there is strong potential for people with dementia to be able to control the timing of the prompts to work through the task at their own pace. These findings will be combined and the prompts will be developed iteratively so that prototype pieces of prompting technology can be created to enable a person with dementia to successfully carry out a task independently.