Smart home concepts help people with dementia dress unaided

Dressing is one of the most common and stressful activities for people with dementia and their carers because of the complexity of the task and lack of privacy.

Now, researchers at New York University (NYU) Rory Meyers College of Nursing, Arizona State University, and MGH Institute of Health Professions in Massachusetts have developed DRESS, an intelligent dressing system that integrates automated tracking and recognition with guided assistance. The goal is to help a person with dementia get dressed without a carer present.

The DRESS prototype is said to use a combination of sensors and image recognition to track progress during the dressing process using barcodes on clothing to identify the type, location, and orientation of a piece of clothing.

According to NYU, a five-drawer dresser - topped with a tablet, camera, and motion sensor - is organised with one piece of clothing per drawer in an order that follows an individual's dressing preferences. A skin conductance sensor worn as a bracelet monitors a person's stress levels.