Proxemo or How to Evaluate User Experience for People with Dementia

Most user experience (UX) evaluation tools require users to self-reflect and to communicate their thoughts (e.g. thinking aloud, retrospective interviews, questionnaires). In the context of designing for people with dementia, however, conditions like aphasia and general cognitive decline restrict the applicability of these methods. In this paper, we report on the iterative design of Proxemo, a smartwatch app for the documentation of observed emotions in people with dementia. Evaluations of Proxemo in dementia care facilities showed that observers considered Proxemo easy to use and preferred it over note-taking on paper. The agreement between different coders was substantial (kappa = .71). We conclude that Proxemo is a promising tool for UX evaluations in the dementia context - and possibly beyond, but further research on the analysis of its generated data is required.