Viability of Magazines for Stimulating Social Interactions in Nursing Homes

Abstract

Social isolation and loneliness have a strong negative impact on health and happiness. The correlation is present at all ages, but the risk of loneliness and isolation is particularly high in later life and when transitioning to residential care settings, where keeping in touch with the family, making new friends and integrating with the community in a new social context can be very challenging. In this note we report on our preliminary studies on the opportunity and feasibility of using custom, printed magazines for increasing feelings of connectedness and promoting meaningful interactions in nursing homes. The content and layout for the magazine are generated in an automatic or semi-automatic way and emphasize aspects that could lead to discovering connections or starting conversations. Initial findings point to the potential for such a magazine and lead to content guidelines that we elaborate in the paper.

Designing for Co-located and Virtual Social Interactions in Residential Care

“…While the idea of reminiscence technology is not novel (see [6] for a review), and previous work have taught us valuable lessons on how to facilitate usage by older adults [13,17], stimulate cognitive functions [8,14], collect memories and support storytelling [1,8,9], little attention has been paid to creating opportunities for social interactions and promoting social integration in residential care. Motivated by recent needfinding studies [4,5], pointing to the potential of reminiscence technology to support NH social activities, we conducted semi-structured interviews and pilot reminiscence sessions to validate the concept of a reminiscence application that builds on the social functions of reminiscence therapy to support (and create opportunities for) co-located and virtual interactions.…”

Designing Interactive Systems to Mediate Communication Between Formal and Informal Caregivers in Aged Care

“…In the same vein, previous work has explored televisits and distant caregiving [19], technology to improve the relationship between family caregivers and NH residents [33], [34], and technology-supported education of family caregivers to enhance communication with NH staff [35]. In their systematic literature review, Chi and Demiris [20] also investigate telehealth interventions from the angle of their usefulness to patients' family caregivers.…”

Smart conversational agents for reminiscence

“…• Archiving life stories and memories, to support personal reflection, knowledge transfer or even virtual storytelling. • Building representations of the life of a person, not only to facilitate browsing, but to serve the growing need for historical information about older adults, e.g., to improve care practices [28], facilitate social interactions [4,25], and build better context and moderators to improve the reminiscence process. • Navigating interests and passions, as to engage users in conversations where they can have fun by navigating their passions (e.g., music, video, movies).…”

“…As we will see, traditional reminiscence technology i) strongly relies on co-located human presence for assisting in the reminiscence process, engaging in conversations or joining social reminiscence sessions; this often requires dedicated personnel, the presence of family member and friends, which greatly limit the practice and potential benefits of reminiscence, especially for those with less access to social contacts; ii) do very little to actively guide reminiscence sessions in a way that is effective and engaging, requiring users (the participant or a guide) to recall important aspects of the participant's life, to rely only on intentional triggers, or to follow predefined templates; thus missing the opportunity to reflect interests and previous stories to make sessions more fun and satisfying, and iii) memory collection and digital storytelling is mostly limited to archiving and browsing, missing the potential benefits of building a rich profile of users, e.g., to improve care practices [28] or facilitate social interactions [4,25], for example by identifying people with common values, or simply by making one's own family, and especially grandchildren, aware of the rich and often interesting life their grandparents have lived and are living.…”