Memory Path: An Inclusive Multimodal Interaction System Design for Home-Based Alzheimer's Care

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive cognitive disorder characterized by memory decline, spatial disorientation, impaired executive function, and emotional-behavioral changes. Its caregiving challenges manifest continuously within the domestic living environment. In China, where home-based care remains the predominant model for elder support, patients frequently experience task forgetting, spatial disorientation, difficulty locating objects, operational errors, and emotional distress within familiar surroundings due to the hidden nature of early symptoms, insufficient daily support, and the limited professional competence of family caregivers. Caregivers, in turn, must sustain long-term responsibilities including reminding, companionship, monitoring, emergency response, and emotional regulation, facing considerable coordination burden. Existing digital health products predominantly focus on singular functions such as medication reminders, health record management, or remote monitoring. Conventional mobile applications continue to rely on text-based reading, hierarchical menus, and active user input, while traditional reminder tools fail to integrate with real domestic spaces and specific task contexts. These limitations make it difficult to simultaneously address the compound needs of low cognitive load for patients, remote coordination for caregivers, and continuous spatial support within the home environment.In response to these challenges, this paper proposes the Memory Path multimodal home support system, taking the triadic interaction relationship among patient, caregiver, and domestic space as its design entry point. The system is grounded in inclusive design theory, operationalizing the principles of recognizing exclusion, designing for one and extending to many, and treating diversity as a resource into concrete design methods. By identifying exclusion contexts in patients' task comprehension, spatial navigation, interface operation, and emotional stability, the system develops low-load interaction strategies. With Alzheimer's patients as the primary user group, simplified interfaces, voice prompts, spatial guidance, and remote collaboration mechanisms are extended to individuals with mild cognitive impairment, elderly users, and diverse family caregiving scenarios. Patient ability differences, caregiver experience variations, and home spatial configurations are simultaneously reframed as configurable resources. The design responds to diverse ability levels and environments through information hierarchy simplification, enhanced multi-channel perception, reduced operational steps, fault-tolerant feedback, and configurable spatial anchors.In terms of system architecture, Memory Path is not a single application but an integrated system comprising a minimalist patient-side application, a caregiver monitoring dashboard, AR spatial anchor navigation, smart bone-conduction earphones, and home environment optimization components. Caregivers can configure daily tasks, edit spatial anchors within the home, and upload family messages, photographs, and familiar music. Patients receive synchronized visual, auditory, and spatial cues through task cards, AR guidance paths, object highlighting, and bone-conduction voice prompts, triggered by specific times, locations, or task states. The system thereby establishes a closed-loop mechanism of configure, trigger, recognize, guide, feedback, and accompany, transforming medication reminders, indoor wayfinding, remote assistance, status feedback, emotional support, and memory prompts into visualizable, audible, and configurable multimodal interaction processes.For subsequent prototype evaluation, the study plans to invite early-stage Alzheimer's patients, family caregivers, and interaction design experts to participate in scenario-based usability testing, System Usability Scale (SUS) assessment, and semi-structured interviews, subject to ethical approval and informed consent. Core interaction flows including medication reminders, AR-based indoor navigation, remote caregiver assistance, and emotional content triggering will be validated. The evaluation will focus on task comprehension difficulty, operational burden, spatial guidance clarity, caregiving coordination experience, and emotional support effectiveness, providing evidence for iterative refinement of interface hierarchy, anchor configuration, and multimodal prompt strategies. This study provides a low-burden, coordinated support pathway for home-based Alzheimer's care contexts and offers practical references for the application of inclusive design principles in cognitive assistance systems.

Keywords: Keywords: Inclusive Design, Alzheimer's Disease, Home-based Care, Multimodal Interaction, AR Spatial Anchors, Smart Wearable Devices

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007579