Leaply
Leaply is a paired device that prevents patients with mild dementia to get lost in indoor spaces and thus provides research opportunities to design disability friendly smart spaces suitable for everyone.
Role:
Product Designer
Tools:
Ultrawide Band, GPS
Timeline:
1 year
Achievements
Finalist, Resilient Hong Kong 2020
The Problem
In Hong Kong, more than 70,000 people are diagnosed with dementia or some sort of cognitive disability. To serve this huge market and to solve these humane problems like David and Cecilia are facing, we proposed our final outcome, that is to prevent patient with mild cognitive disabilities such as dementia, from getting lost from their caregiver.
In the past year, we went through the whole process of identifying problems, doing user research, and try to create something that could help our target user, David and Cecilia, who are an elderly couple. David is 65, Cecilia is 60 and she has mild dementia. The couple has been living independently for years now and we were lucky to have participated in seeing how they live their lives alone and the how they support each other. We were able to empathize with David when he would have to guide Cecilia through malls since she could not remember the way back home, and we were able to watch Cecilia lose memory of a lot of the things we would talk about.
David openly told us about all the issues that he was having in terms of consoling Cecilia at night times when she would become very paranoid due to not having control over how much memory her brain can retain. One of the main problems that David would always talk about is how Cecilia would get lost even in her own home, or when they were getting dinner at the nearby mall for two minutes- and how that would make both David and Cecilia extremely anxious. That really stuck with us and we made it our goal to solve their problems.
The Solution
We realized what Cecilia and David really need is a way for Cecilia to always be reconnected, even in the darkest of times when Cecilia doesn’t remember herself.
But we couldn’t stop wondering, can technology really solve such a humane problem?
After a few iterations,
we knew we can.
Here’s how ——>
We did a little bit of prototyping.
Why? So that Cecilia is comfortable to adapt to a new wearable.
And ultimately, we realized we should keep the product customizable - because everyone has a different choice. Especially, with as sensitive a case as dementia.
Usability Tests
We tried out our prototype on the streets to see how much distance we can cover between the receiver and the transmitter.
Designing Elderly Friendly Spaces
During the design process, we found out, because we are using GPS anyway, we can track down malls and public areas where people with dementia get lost the most and design friendly spaces for them.