Designing for dementia – Early stage patients in Alzheimer’s special care units

Over the past decades, the population’s accelerated aging rate has become a major issue in the world. In 2017, more than 962 million people in the world were aged 60 years or more, with more than 137 million of people aged 80 years and over, and these numbers keep increasing.

With age, senior citizens are becoming more fragile, and are more susceptible to diseases, injuries etc. In particular, Alzheimer’s disease touches more than 50 million people in the world today, with nearly 10 million new cases diagnosed every year.

People with Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia are very sensitive to their environment : in fact, the environment in which they are living is critical for their well- being. My objective through this project is to understand how design and architecture can have an impact on the on the daily life of patients with Alzheimer’s, as well as on their quality of life.