Care homes for persons with dementia are being designed so that caregivers can easily observe and therefore respond to the needs of people with dementia. However, the layout of care homes can then become overly restrictive for its residents, for example, by not supporting intermediate spaces where people can come across one another and start a conversation. We report a case study where a video monitoring system was deployed into a purpose-built care home to help caregivers to observe activities in the blind spots pertaining to the layout. We had carried out a study prior to and subsequent to the deployment of video monitoring in order to understand its impact. We found that both the caregivers and the residents benefitted from video monitoring, provided it is deployed sensitively. Furthermore, the deployment of video monitoring enables the design of more beneficial physical layouts. The deployment of video monitoring goes along with the physical layout of care homes.

This paper focuses on care plans (i.e., rough schedules) in care houses and evaluates them from the viewpoint of a deep and stable sleep which contributes to provide comfortable and healthy life for aged persons. For this purpose, this paper investigates the care plans which are basically based on the current care plans but change a small part of a schedule as an aged person desires. Through the human subject experiments in the actual care house, the following implications have been revealed: (1) the proposed care plan decreases the time of the light sleep; and (2) the proposed care plan provides the deep sleep (i.e., 9 years younger sleep in our experiment).