Homes for Life and HawkEye: Two design fiction artefacts to elicit participants’ views about smart home monitoring systems for people with dementia

Smart home technologies hold the promise to enable people living with dementia to stay in their home independently for longer, but have also attracted debate about their impact on the privacy of the residents due to constant data collection. In this paper we present two speculative and critical artefacts - a video and a tangible prototype - that we developed to stimulate debate about these technologies. In an initial study in which we focused on designers and developers, whose views on dementia are often based in a medical model, we learned that both artefacts stimulated a nuanced and empathic response that might in turn be useful to overcome predominant views on dementia and lead to new approaches in technology design.