Research Article Co-Designing Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Environments: Unravelling the Situated Context of Informal Dementia Care Amy S. Hwang, 1 Khai N. Truong, 2 Jill I. Cameron, 1 Eva Lindqvist, 3 Louise Nygård, 3 and Alex Mihailidis 1 1 Rehabilitation Sciences Institute and Department of Occupational Sciences & Occupational Terapy, University of Toronto, 160-500 University Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 1V7 2 Department of Sofware and Information Systems, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA 3 Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Division of Occupational Terapy, Karolinska Institutet, 141 83 Huddinge, Sweden Correspondence should be addressed to Amy S. Hwang; amy.hwang@mail.utoronto.ca Received 30 November 2014; Accepted 20 February 2015 Academic Editor: Stephen Goss Copyright © 2015 Amy S. Hwang et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Ambient assisted living (AAL) aims to help older persons “age-in-place” and manage everyday activities using intelligent and pervasive computing technology. AAL research, however, has yet to explore how AAL might support or collaborate with informal care partners (ICPs), such as relatives and friends, who play important roles in the lives and care of persons with dementia (PwDs). In a multiphase codesign process with six (6) ICPs, we envisioned how AAL could be situated to complement their care. We used our codesigned “caregiver interface” artefacts as triggers to facilitate envisioning of AAL support and unpack the situated, idiosyncratic context within which AAL aims to assist. Our fndings suggest that AAL should be designed to support ICPs in fashioning “do-it- yourself ” solutions that complement tacitly improvised care strategies and enable them to try, observe, and adapt to solutions over time. In this way, an ICP could decide which activities to entrust to AAL support, when (i.e., scheduled or spontaneous) and how a system should provide support (i.e., using personalized prompts based on care experience), and when adaptations to system support are needed (i.e., based alerting patterns and queried reports). Future longitudinal work employing participatory, design-oriented methods with care dyads is encouraged. 1. Introduction As the most important contributors to dependence and institutionalization, dementia and cognitive impairment [1] profoundly impact not only persons living with impairment, but also their signifcant others, relatives, and friends. While public health systems strive to assist persons with dementia (PwDs) to live at home [2], Canadian home care resources continue to fall short in meeting real-world needs [3], consequently shifing care responsibilities to informal care partners (ICPs)—most commonly family members [4]. Te role of an ICP involves responding to increasing care needs and dependency over time. With or without formal support, an ICP will typically transition from supporting instrumental activities of daily living (ADLs) (e.g., fnances and shopping) to assisting with basic ADLs (e.g., bathing and dressing) and to providing constant care and supervision [1]. Although the stress and burden associated with caring for a PwD is well documented (e.g., [5–9]), ICPs may wish to continue caring for as long as possible for reasons that include fulflling flial duties [10] or continuing their relationships with PwDs [11, 12]. Taken together, there is a need for policies, services, and interventions that can better support and collaborate with ICPs in the care of PwDs [3, 13]. Concurrently, the emerging feld of ambient assisted living (AAL) has positioned itself to enable older adults, including PwDs, to “age-in-place” (i.e., at home and in their communities) through the support of intelligent and perva- sive computing (also referred to as “smart home”) technolo- gies. Tis class of technologies aims to deliver unobtrusive, Hindawi Publishing Corporation BioMed Research International Volume 2015, Article ID 720483, 12 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/720483