Abstract
Dementia affects >50 million worldwide, causing progressive cognitive
and physical disabilities. Its caregiving burden falls largely onto
informal caregivers, who experience their own health problems, and face
tremendous stress with little support–all exacerbated during COVID-19.
In this paper, we present a new caregiver support perspective, where the
lenses of health equity and community health can shape future technology
design. Through a 1.5 year long, in-depth research process with dementia
community health workers, we learned how caregiving support technology
can reflect key concepts in dementia community health practice. This
paper makes two contributions: 1) We propose employing embodied cueing,
such as imitation or action mimicry, as a communication modality that
can align technology with community caregiving approaches, promote
agency in people with dementia, and relieve caregiver burden, and 2) We
suggest new avenues for HCI research to advance health equity in the
context of dementia technology design.