Inclusive Design for Alzheimer’s Disease: Low-cost Treatments, Design and ICT

Abstract

Inability to acquire new memories, difficulty to remember recent events and to recognize objects, places and people, visual-spatial disorientation, these are some of the disorders with which who is affected by neurological diseases must learn to live with. In a continuously evolving society, where the decreasing birth rate and the drops in mortality are consistent, the job of Architecture is precisely to interpret the requirements and needs of people who have lost the canonical relationship with the world and give them the possibility to recover it or maintain it through communication channels that use their remaining ability to understand. The indoors and outdoors acquire a “prosthesis function”, containing and expressing the knowledge necessary to its right enjoyment, reducing the frustration sense through the safety and well-being feeling that the patient must perceive by living in it. This essay is a contribution to the dissemination of knowledge and useful information to those who work in the field of organization and design of health services, reporting “non-pharmacological”, low-cost and sustainable therapeutic solutions promoted by international and national technological research in the field of Design technology and ICT and which have proven to be able to significantly help both patients and caregivers.