Memory Compensation Research Based On Psychology In Product Design

In the social context of increasing aging of population and the increment of thenumber of dementia patients, together with the tendency of fast paced lifestyle and theheavy burden exerted on people’s memories by the diversified smart products, the concernabout people’s memory and methods to compensate problems raised has become a heatedtopic. This paper is prepared to solve or at least ease those widespread memory issues bybringing public attention to the problem and utilising products for compensation. What’smore, a certain degree of attention would be brought to the weak.This article is arranged from the general cases to the particular ones. It starts byanalysing the attributes of average population’s memory and behaviour and then moving onto the special groups who are the seniors and dementia patients. Subsequently, based on thememory-related knowledge of Psychology theory, analysis will be made on the processes ofmemorising and behavioral characteristics and then exploration will be undertaken tocategorise memory compensating products. According to the patterns of the products, theyare sorted into three groups-separate,embedded and serviced. Depending on users’ needsfor memory, ways of compensating memory are divided into four classes-no memory to beadded, memory to be decreased, memory to be enhanced and memory to be guided. Amongthem, the guiding of memory includes the usage of words and signs. Regarding to howusers’ access their information, ways to compensate can be classified as visual, hearing,other senses and the comprehensive multi-senses. Products via comprehensive multi-sensesare better auxiliary tools than the single sensory channel product in the process ofinformation feedback and confirmation. Among the single sense channels, visual sensecompensating products are more common than hearing ones. Hearing compensatingproducts are more often used to warn people. Use of other senses compensating goods isrelatively rare.