Care and Connect: Exploring Dementia-friendliness through an Online Community Commissioning Platform

In this paper, we present 'Care and Connect', a mobile application created through the App Movement platform that aims to identify and rate public places (e.g., parks, shops, cafes) on their 'dementia-friendliness' - their suitability for people with dementia and their carers. Care and Connect saw significant support in its early stages on the online platform, yet failed to engage participants in its design phase and deployment. To unpack this, we contribute an account of its initial use in the community, and then describe findings from research engagements with carers and people with dementia. These workshops used Care and Connect to structure discussions of participants' own experiences of dementia-friendliness, and uncovered themes of 1) trust, 2) exclusion versus inclusion, 3) duration and quality of time, and 4) empathy becoming action. Using this evidence, we advance an account of online community commissioning as a process which needs to understand not only the general issues ongoing in communities facing significant life challenges, but also the particularity of community members' experiences.