Summary

People suffering from mild dementia may get lost during a walk, which can be dangerous for them and adds to the anxiety felt by their informal caregivers. TalkMeHome is a new service that allows these people to get home safely in such situations using their mobile phone. They can call a remote care professional who will guide the lost person home. To accomplish this, the professional caregiver is able to follow the person’s GPS-location on a map and in Google Streetview. This paper reports on four experiments with TalkMeHome to assess the effectiveness and user experience of the service. In all four cases the participants were guided home satisfactorily, even under suboptimal conditions. The experiments further revealed that talking people home is demanding for the care professional and that they need adequate ICT support. The contribution of our work is that we evaluated this new service with real patients and real professional care givers in a semi-controlled environment.