Evaluating an App to Promote a Better Visit Through Shared Activities for People Living with Dementia and their Families

Understanding How Sensory Changes Experienced by Individuals with a Range of Age-Related Cognitive Changes Can Affect Technology Use

“…This approach has also been taken in commercially available systems, such as MapHabit, which pairs visual with audio or written instructions to support everyday task completion [20,72]. Muñoz et al found that their touchscreen app called "A Better Visit" enabled interactions between caregiver-person with dementia dyads by curating content that specifically supported "pre-existing interests" [87]. This application created multi-sensory experiences in apps like Tic-Tac-Tango -which played familiar ballroom music and replaced typical X's and O's with visually-stimulating dance moves -and sought to "support personhood" through personalization and familiar experiences [87].…”

“…Muñoz et al found that their touchscreen app called "A Better Visit" enabled interactions between caregiver-person with dementia dyads by curating content that specifically supported "pre-existing interests" [87]. This application created multi-sensory experiences in apps like Tic-Tac-Tango -which played familiar ballroom music and replaced typical X's and O's with visually-stimulating dance moves -and sought to "support personhood" through personalization and familiar experiences [87]. Like MapHabit, both of these systems use multimodal promptsthe designers explain this design decision was made to ensure "interfaces that are highly adaptable to the cognitive support needs and any perception disabilities" [72].…”

“…Researchers in HCI have designed technologies to facilitate musical creativity [83,102,103] and to give people with dementia more control over playing music [109]. When developing their application "A Better Visit", Muñoz et al found that embedding musical elements throughout the cooperative games encouraged engagement and concentration among people with dementia, especially if that music was familiar to them [87]. Houben et al, point out that music only represents a subset of the sounds that people perceive, and in contrast to experiences with music, experiences of everyday sounds for people with dementia are significantly under studied [57].…”

“…The authors explored the reactions of people with early and moderate dementia to generic, everyday sounds, finding that this provided opportunities for meaningful interactions, but also that soundscapes could feel chaotic and overwhelming [57]. Muñoz et al found similar success when using sounds to facilitate accurate guessing in the game Reveal, using animal sounds to help users recognize what animal was represented in a picture before they could see it fully [87].…”

Evaluating Engagement in Technology-Supported Social Interaction by People Living with Dementia in Residential Care

“…his work is part of a larger project in which our team, as part of the Future Self Living Lab, have collaborated with Dementia Australia and with Lifeview Residential Care to design tablet technologies for people living with dementia in residential care homes. he team followed a co-design process [53] that led to the development and a mixed-methods evaluation of the A Beter Visit app [51]. he research team aimed to understand how social interaction was enacted between residents and visitors when using the A Beter Visit app, what role the app had in the social interactions, and to understand how people showed and assessed engagement in the context of use of the app.…”