A compass for people with dementia: Yes, he has dementia and yes, he has gotten lost before. And yet he always finds his home

The disorientation started in Australia. On the way to an acquaintance, Ben van Dijk drove in the wrong direction. His wife Ineke was sitting next to him and started: ‘Where are you going?’

Back in the Netherlands – the couple remigrated in 2023 after four decades Down Under – Ben had to look for his keys and coat more and more often and he told his daughter that he no longer knew what her house looked like. One day he got lost in the center of his hometown of Baarn. “I thought: should I go left or right? I think I went right – I don’t remember that either,” says Ben (86) at his kitchen table with Ineke (84) next to him. “And then I walked a long way and at a street that turned left I thought: oh, I’ll go that way. Eventually I ended up here in our street and I thought: now I remember!”

A year ago he learned that he had Alzheimer’s, Ben says. “Well, I started to shed a tear.” He was assigned a ‘dementia case manager’, affiliated with a care institution, who guides and advises Ben and Ineke about living with the disease. She started talking about a tool: a compass especially for people with dementia. It was still in the making, but about thirty people were allowed to try it out during the summer of 2025.

The Van Dijks agreed and were sent home the compass: a round instrument, eight centimeters in diameter, with a pink needle on a white dial. Hidden underneath: a chip with GPS. The probationary period is now well over, but Ben van Dijk still has the compass. He quite likes it. Wherever he walks, the compass needle points to his house.

Simpler

The inventor is Rens Brankaert (37), who, as a professor and lecturer in Eindhoven and Tilburg, is involved in technological innovations in healthcare, especially in the field of dementia. Brankaert was still in his twenties and a master’s student in industrial design at TU Eindhoven when he came up with the idea of ​​the compass. Thanks to his grandfather. He developed dementia and became lost more and more often during his long bike rides, especially on the way back when he got tired. „

Then we had to go out as a family to find him,” Brankaert says on the telephone. He had been studying the care of people with dementia for several years and had noticed that technological aids were often developed without the participation of the people with dementia themselves. Such as GPS trackers that are often given to them while walking. Although these trackers enable healthcare staff and informal caregivers to keep an eye on things via an app, they do not help the walker’s orientation.

At sessions organized by Brankaert and colleagues, the target group – people living at home with dementia – received new prototypes of the compass each time. The subjects placed it on their palm, felt buttons and judged the shape. Make it simpler, was their feedback time and time again. For example, the digital voice in the compass that told the hiker to “go straight now” was destroyed. The target group started to wonder where that voice came from. Google Maps on the compass? Also too complicated.

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Prick

The outcome was an analogue dial, with a single arrow-shaped needle pointing home as the crow flies, controlled by the GPS that determines the location with up to half a meter of precision. The compass also contains a sensor sensitive to rotation: if you turn it over in your hand, the arrow springs back in the right direction. At home, you poke a needle once into a hole at the bottom of the compass to calibrate the location.

Ben and Ineke van Dijk first walked through the neighborhood together to test the compass and when it turned out to be fine, they took it with them in their suitcase on holiday to Germany. They poked the compass again with a needle so that their hotel in Trier became the benchmark, says Ineke. “We were miserable for five days.”

Developers of the compass want to use a ‘monthly model’: 20 euros per month and keeping the computer system up to date

And now Van Dijk picks his Australian country hat from the coat rack, leaves the apartment complex and turns right. The compass is in his pocket: he can go wherever he wants during the first half of the walk. He walks at a fast pace. “I have to keep these things in good condition,” he says, looking at his legs, “otherwise I have to go in a cart.” He turns left into a street and then right, passing one large detached house after another – “look how beautiful, then you start to drool, don’t you?” – and compliments a man raking autumn leaves on the sidewalk in front of his house. “Hey, you’re doing that nicely!”

A moment later he stops, looks around and says: “I don’t know this street.” A water tower looms on the left – “oh look!” he says. Turn right, turn left and Van Dijk spots a train through a hedge along the sidewalk. “Hey, are we at the station?” Yes, as it turns out. Van Dijk accepts the return route, puts the compass in his hand and follows the direction of the needle. And when he stops a few minutes later at a junction, he says: “I thought: to the left here.” But he follows the compass, and it points to the right.

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Wandering behavior

In 2021, Rens Brankaert won an encouragement prize for young dementia researchers worth 100,000 euros, awarded by Alzheimer Nederland. The foundation called its technology “non-stigmatizing” and “easy to use.” From 2023 onwards, a start-up started working to prepare the compass for the market. Aumens, that is the name of the company, is run by two of Brankaert’s former industrial design students, the twin brothers Rick and Vincent Eurlings (26). They hope for a market launch in the summer of 2026. High on their to-do list is an app, which can be linked to the compass, which allows informal caregivers to check where the walker is, if desired.

A “smart algorithm,” they say, should detect “wandering behavior” – for example, someone who keeps walking up and down one and the same street – after which the informal caregiver receives a push message. And perhaps in such a case they let the compass vibrate briefly, so that the wandering runner retrieves it from his pocket and finds his way again without the help of third parties. “People with dementia often no longer dare to go outside, while exercise is so important,” says Rick Eurlings. The brothers want to use a “monthly model”: 20 euros per month for the compass and keeping the computer system up to date. They are in discussions with health insurers in the hope of reimbursement.

Ah, festive lights, that must be the Laanstraat

The compass is already popular. About 25 elderly care institutions and representatives of ‘dementia networks’, responsible for dementia care at home, have already ordered it. The first version of the compass will target people in the often years-long phase between early forgetfulness and advanced dementia. The compass was particularly effective among them, as the summer pilot among thirty people in different phases of the disease showed.

People in the early stages, provided they are technically skilled, can often still manage their smartphone navigation, and for people with advanced dementia the compass is often too complicated. Nevertheless, the start-up receives interested emails from nursing homes, whose residents often suffer from a serious form of dementia. Nursing homes are still struggling with the legally imposed obligation in 2020 to no longer close their external doors to their residents, no matter how forgetful.

“Ah, festive lights, that must be the Laanstraat,” says Van Dijk and he walks into the shopping street. A T-junction now. Well: left or right? The compass points almost straight ahead, straight through a jewelry store. Van Dijk looks attentively at the dial, says that the needle “points slightly to the right” and turns right. A few minutes later he walks into his own street. Yes, the compass has made him walk more, he says. “And my wife,” he adds in Australian style, “doesn’t have to worry-and.”

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