Outputs

Choosing a focus

The discovery phase highlighted a clear opportunity for us to look at how managed devices might be a tool to help community groups run hybrid or online sessions to connect and support people living with dementia.

Our focus: Getting people on Zoom

We decided to focus our next phase of research on maximising accessibility to online video calls (using Zoom) and making this experience as easy and intuitive as possible. We made this decision as we felt that supporting one task well leads to building confidence with technology, which may lead to other uses.

The benefits of helping people join a Zoom call include:

• Close to ‘real’ human contact so it directly addresses isolation
• Seeing faces and body language is valuable to people living with dementia
• Video calls can provide access to group activities
• Richer contact with friends and family, near and far

We focused on Zoom over alternative options because:

• It seemed to be the preferred platform for community groups coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic
• We personally judged it to be the most accessible and simple platform 
• Although there were some initial security concerns about Zoom at the beginning of the pandemic, we believe these have been suitably addressed with adequate meeting controls now added
• Flexible settings and host features would allow us to experiment with how to make joining a call frictionless  
• Well supported for iOS and Android devices

Although we developed a clear focus, we maintained an open mind about the potential outcomes of the project as we started to collaborate with community organisations and people living with dementia in the next phase.