Editorial on special issue on Pervasive care for people with dementia and their carers

The global population of persons aged 60 and over is rising dramatically. Between 2006 and 2050, the number of people aged 60 and over will double from 650 million to 2 billion people representing 22% of humanity. One group of the ageing population that is particularly vulnerable to loss of independence is those affected by dementia. It is estimated that around 820,000 people in the UK have dementia. Recently, emerging computing and assistive technology has been used to attempt to improve the quality of life for people with dementia. To provide a forum for discussion on challenges and opportunities in bringing technology to support people with dementia, we organised a workshop featuring the theme of ‘engaging people with pervasive technology’ in dementia research. The first workshop, entitled ‘Pervasive care for people with dementia and their carers’ (PCPDC), was held on May 23rd, 2011 in Dublin, Ireland, in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth-2011). Our call for papers attracted academic and industrial researchers in the communities from Ireland, UK, Switzerland and China, with a total of five papers accepted and presented at the workshop. In this special issue, we included three papers that were selected from the original workshop submissions and were accepted after rigorous peer reviews of their substantially expanded version of the manuscripts. We also included two papers that were submitted to this special issue general call and were accepted after review.