People with dementia need personalized care, especially because their symptoms arise from their past experience and current relationships with their families and friends.

In Japanese outpatient clinic settings, sessions for each patient tend to be very brief owing to the large number of patients visiting hospitals; quite often, sessions are as short as three minutes and can only be held once every three months.

Unlike other diseases that physicians deal with, this state of affairs is hardly tolerable, because it is obvious that under these circumstances it is almost impossible for healthcare professionals to obtain personal information or give personal advice.

Professionals involved in dementia care range from physicians to community volunteers; sharing patient background information or current status among those individuals is extremely important.

However, in addition to the previously mentioned limitations, person-to-person and community-based approaches are becoming increasingly difficult in urban setting.

Thus, better dementia care requires better communication tools that also assure secure information exchange.

This is the reason that we developed an information and a communication technology (ICT)-based communication tool, named “WASURE-NAVI-TO” to improve the current situation.

During this symposium we will show “WASURE-NAVI-TO”, which will provide a novel personal health record (PHR) management system for dementia patients and their families.