Using emerging tech to help people with Alzheimer’s
Ryan Shanks is managing director of The Dock, Accenture’s global R&D and innovation center. He describes a recent project to help Jacinta Dixon cope with the symptoms of a rare form of Alzheimer’s.
Here at The Dock, our multidisciplinary teams work to pioneer new ways to fulfil human needs using emerging technology. We’re typically trying to solve problems that impact some of the biggest companies in the world and are challenging entire industries.
Recently, though, we got the chance to focus on solving a problem for one person: Jacinta Dixon.
From idea to impact
Jacinta was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease in 2017, and as a result of her condition, she has problems with visual processing. She developed dyslexia and is now unable to read.
A concept was developed by Accenture’s The Dock. It was designed in collaboration with Design Partners and Amazon Alexa.
Jacinta’s story was featured as part of the TV show Big Life Fix, which aired on Ireland’s most watched TV station, RTÉ One.
A Dock team, led by Lorna Ross, initially met with Jacinta and several medical practitioners to understand the trajectory of Jacinta’s disease. Ross was then director of Fjord studio in The Dock and is now chief innovation officer at VHI — one of Ireland’s leading health insurers.
A solution for reading
When meeting Jacinta, what struck the team was her personality, her charisma, how intelligent she is. What wasn’t evident at all was her disease.
She explained how the thing that was most important to her, was reading.
While looking forward to her retirement, she had built up a large collection of classic books which she planned to work through. Now, she was coming to terms with the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to read again.
A few concepts were developed in a design sprint that brought together The Dock team, Gregor Timlin (author of Design for Dementia), Gavin O’Duffy and Max Amordeluso from Amazon Alexa, and two clinicians, including Jacinta’s neuropsychologist Dr Garret McDermott.
The design challenges
From workshops at The Dock, the team focused in on the idea of a chair that could change environments, as she moves closer to friends and family and if she then has to move into a care home. A lot of assisted technology can fail after a matter of months for the time it is intended, but the chair is designed to last her for her life.
One of the main challenges was designing something for a person who might not be able to use a typical interface or the technology itself.
With this in mind, the chair is a piece of furniture with embedded Amazon Alexa voice technology, speakers and tactile controls that enables Jacinta to easily access and enjoy music, audiobooks and radio. Amazon Alexa supplied a range of products for the team to work with, and custom built ‘tasks’ within Amazon Alexa so that they would work without an activation word. This was one of the first times Alexa was integrated with a piece of furniture.
The experience was prototyped and iterated at The Dock before Design Partners came on board to design and build the final artefact.
Although full of smart technology, Jacinta’s chair integrates it in such a way that it never compromises on everything a favorite chair in her home needs to be. A ‘bespoke solution’ is perhaps an over-used phrase but, in this case, it is particularly apt. This is a great example of the power of design and technology working in tandem to find the right solution — in this case, for Jacinta.
Final testing
The chair was tested onsite at The Dock before being brought to Jacinta’s house for a big reveal on July 8th, 2019. Jacinta’s story and the chair’s development was featured as part of the TV show ‘Big Life Fix’, which aired on Ireland’s most watched TV station, RTÉ One.
Of the team, Jacinta said: “They’ve been so supportive. They’ve been so patient. It’s really amazing and I also see it as a real privilege to have had this opportunity and hopefully that will move on to other people. But I was the first,” she says with a laugh.
A lot of what we do at The Dock is around fulfilling human needs using emerging technology. This was an exceptional project that really showed the difference we can make when we combine our diverse resources and get experts from a wide scope of areas — from designers and doctors to engineers and ergonomists — all working together towards one goal: in this case, helping Jacinta with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
So where does this go from here? We’ve been studying the Future Home more broadly, because utilities, telcos, insurers and others see opportunities to build offerings and business around the home — for the benefit of society and the bottom line. We are taking the learnings from our experience with Jacinta and Big Life Fix into our work with our global clients and partners. Our ambition is to move from idea to scaled impact.
I couldn’t be prouder of the team and the huge effort they put into this project, and of course it couldn’t have happened without our collaborators Design Partners and Amazon Alexa.
The full episode of Big Life Fix is now available to watch on RTE Player
