Designing Leisure Products for People With Dementia: Developing ‘‘the Chitchatters’’ Game

Abstract

Providing leisure to people with dementia is a serious challenge, for health care professionals and designers and engineers of products used for activity sessions. This article describes the design process of ''the Chitchatters,'' a leisure game for a group of people with dementia in day care centers. The game aims to stimulate social interaction among people with dementia. Different stakeholders, such as older adults with dementia, their relatives and care professionals were involved in the design process via qualitative research methods as participant observation and the use of probes. These methods were applied to give the design team insight into the experiential world of people with dementia. This article presents how design insights from practice and literature can be translated into a real design for a leisure product for group use by older people with dementia, and shows designers how to work with, and design for, special groups.

Qualitative study on needs and wishes of early-stage dementia caregivers: the paradox between needing and accepting help

“…As caregiver needs may differ based on practical aspects such as the care organization per region (Wolfs et al, 2011), this may have threatened the transferability of our results. Also, the present study applied within-method triangulation combining data from the written transcripts, videotapes, and the concept mapping approach, which allowed us to derive information from the context outside of the focus group interviews and allowed participants to reflect on their situation beforehand, possibly increasing the information depth during the focus group interviews (Patton, 2002;van Rijn et al, 2010). Second, the present study did not apply methodological triangulation of qualitative methods, which could have compensated for the limitations of individual interviews and focus group interviews separately.…”

“…This approach presumes that information about the context of people's interactions in their everyday life is needed to reveal experiences and emotions in a group environment. This indirect approach was chosen to minimize the risk of increasing feelings of distress caused by directly confronting caregivers with the memory impairment of their loved one (van Rijn et al, 2010). Therefore, we provided them with packages comprising a booklet to capture parts of their history and current life with their spouse two weeks before the interview.…”

The behavioral outcomes of a technology-supported leisure activity in people with dementia

“…The Chitchatters is a technology-based leisure activity developed for PwD by two industrial designers from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands [15]. The technology itself includes four interactive objects: a television, a radio, a telephone and a treasure box (Fig.…”

“…This study evaluates a technology-supported leisure activity called the Chitchatters game (CC) [15] in order to get an insight into the use of technology in leisure activities. Such technology-supported leisure activities are hypothesized to be more effective compared to traditional activity sessions because of the possibility to create person-centered care, make the activity more interactive and be supportive for activity facilitators.…”

Lessons learned from participatory design with and for people with dementia

“…However, latest efforts started focusing more on positively affecting patients' quality of life, i.e. helping them perform activities of daily life [3], maintaining social contacts [4], organizing their day [5], playing games [6] and supporting reminiscence therapy [7]. Designing these kinds of technologies with the aim to enhance quality of life for people with dementia requires a deep understanding of symptoms, problems and user needs.…”