Seeing Through Their Eyes: An Empathy-Driven Visualisation Framework for Dementia Care

Dementia care requires healthcare professionals to address both patients’ clinical needs and their personal experiences, preferences, and emotional cues. However, many current digital tools focus primarily on quantitative data and performance metrics, often neglecting the relational and empathetic aspects of care, which limits caregivers’ ability to develop a deeper, person-centred understanding of those they support. This paper presents an empathy-centred visualisation framework, developed through a design study, to address this gap. The framework integrates established principles of person-centred care with empathy mapping methodologies to encourage deeper engagement through three key design pillars: Hierarchical Salience-Driven Design, Task-Optimised Iconography, and First-Person Narrative Integration. Our methodology provides a structured approach to designing for indirect end-users patients whose experience is shaped by a tool they may not directly interact with. To validate the framework, we conducted evaluations with healthcare professionals that included usability testing of a functional prototype and a User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) study. The findings demonstrated the framework’s feasibility, with participants emphasising its potential to foster more personal, empathetic interactions between medical staff and patients. We demonstrate how empathy can be systematically embedded into visualisation design. As dementia remains one of the leading causes of neurological disability and mortality worldwide, our framework offers a scalable and structured blueprint for integrating human-centred care into digital tools, addressing the urgent need to improve dementia patients’ experiences in hospital settings.