Co-designing a Smart Mirror to Support People Living with Dementia and Their Carers

People living with dementia (PLwD) often struggle to complete Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and may resist unfamiliar, intrusive, or narrowly targeted assistive technologies. We report the co-design and development of a modular, low-cost, open-source smart mirror that delivers personalized, multimodal, and context-aware prompting while preserving the familiar aesthetic of a household mirror. Through iterative co-design sessions, stakeholders shaped features such as customizable visual, textual, and spoken prompts, including familiar prerecorded or AI generated voices, sensors’ triggered notifications, privacy-preserving local data processing, and camera-free multi-user identification. Feedback highlighted the importance of familiar design, adaptability, and non-intrusive interaction, guiding incremental refinements across sessions. The resulting prototype demonstrates strong potential as an accessible and dignified assistive technology for supporting independence for PLwD, and establishes a foundation for future in-home longitudinal evaluations and advanced monitoring capabilities.