Sure. When we think about the design of a care home or a care environment, what we're talking about is how the built environment is shaped. I'll give an example pulling from your hallway. It's nice and clean and has great lines. It's awful for somebody with dementia. The surfaces are hard; there's lots of reflection and glare, and there's not a lot of contrast between the walls and the floor. If you put somebody who has a cognitive impairment in that environment, they will become disoriented. They may not know where they are. They'll have trouble finding their way out. I'm a grown adult and I'm going to have to look at my way-finding cues to find my way out. That's how design can look when it's not supportive.
When we talk about dementia-friendly, what we mean is engineering the built environment such that it supports somebody who has difficulty hearing, who may have difficulty with vision or who has difficulty with information processing because their brain has changed, so that they can navigate that environment and interact with it successfully.
A great example of that in care homes is that in the new designs, you don't have dead-end hallways. If somebody has dementia and hits a dead end and they're trying to get out the door, that can lead really quickly to a feeling of angst, anxiety, stress, or anger, so what you see in the newer care homes now are circular hallways so people can have a continuous path instead of hitting a dead end. That's just one example of many, but you can see in that example how that translates directly to the safety of the care providers because they're not dealing with somebody who's upset or angry because they found that dead-end exit.