Abstract
BackgroundThis research reports on a pilot study that examined the usability of a reminiscence app called ‘InspireD’ using eye tracking technology. The InspireD app is a bespoke digital intervention aimed at supporting personalized reminiscence for people living with dementia and their carers. The app was developed and refined in two co‐creation workshops and subsequently tested in a third workshop using eye tracking technology.InterventionEye tracking was used to gain insight into the user's cognition since our previous work showed that the think‐aloud protocol can add to cognitive burden for people living with dementia while also making the test more unnatural.ResultsResults showed that there were no barriers to using a wearable eye tracker in this setting and participants were able to use the reminiscence app freely. However, some tasks required prompts from the observer when difficulties arose. While prompts are not normally used in usability testing (as some argue the prompting defeats the purpose of testing), we used ‘prompt frequency’ as a proxy for measuring the intuitiveness of the task. There was a correlation between task completion rates and prompt frequency. Results also showed that people living with dementia had fewer gaze fixations when compared to their carers. Carers had greater fixation and saccadic frequencies when compared to people living with dementia. This perhaps indicates that people living with dementia take more time to scan and consume information on an app. A number of identified usability issues are also discussed in the paper.Patient or Public ContributionThe study presents findings from three workshops which looked at user needs analysis, feedback and an eye tracking usability test combined involving 14 participants, 9 of whom were people living with dementia and the remaining 5 were carers.
Highlights
Dementia is a progressive condition which currently has no cure
Given that the ‘think-aloud’ method can be challenging as concurrently doing a task and verbalizing your thoughts induces additional cognitive burden,[13] perhaps eye tracking is a useful method for gaining insight into the user experience of a person living with dementia
The inclusion criteria specified that all participants needed to be able and willing to engage in the co-creation, testing and evaluation of the reminiscence app
Summary
Dementia is a progressive condition which currently has no cure. The World Health Organization estimates that there are currently 50 million people living with dementia, with 10 million new cases every year.[1]. Given that the ‘think-aloud’ method can be challenging as concurrently doing a task (interacting with an app) and verbalizing your thoughts induces additional cognitive burden,[13] perhaps eye tracking is a useful method for gaining insight into the user experience of a person living with dementia. Activities such as reminiscence which stimulate memories for people living with dementia have been well documented.[14] Butler[15] first coined the phrase ‘Life Review’ and suggested that people in later years ( older adults) became more involved in a process of ‘looking back’ to identify, reflect, resolve or cherish memories from the. What differences exist in usability metrics between people living with dementia and their carers when using the InspireD app?
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