Virtual ‘time machine’ takes dementia residents home
A new app is transporting those living in residential aged care with mid to later stage dementia back to the ‘familiar’ and comforting surroundings of home.
Mandy Salomon, a Swinburne University of Technology PhD student, is the designer of a new app helping aged care residents with mid to later stage dementia 'feel at home' in care.
Designer of the app, Mandy Salomon, a Swinburne University of Technology PhD student, draws inspiration from the world of virtual reality. She developed the app with the help of dementia patients living in residential aged care.
The project is called Applying Virtual Environments for Dementia Care (AVED), which uses virtual reality to help dementia patients living in aged care residence.
Virtual reality presents endless opportunities for people with dementia, who are missing the familiar and comforting surroundings of home.
“Home is universal and we know people miss it,” Ms Salomon says. “We chose familiar places for our 3D environment; a sitting room, kitchen and garden, to offer people meaningful tasks drawn from their past,” she adds.
AVED is a pilot prototype of an interactive, tablet based, 3D environment, which is guided by Ms Salomon’s extensive field research. It has been built by a team of former and current Swinburne students, led by PhD students James Bonner and Norman Wang.
“Residents can decorate their virtual rooms using colours, fabric swatches and paintings or drag their favourite photos into wall frames. Or they can just touch and explore. It’s a bit like a game but there’s no prescribed narrative,” Ms Salomon says.
In her assessment of AVED, Ms Salomon looks at a number of factors, including how residents ‘experienced’ the activity, the interactions they undertook and if using the app provoked reflection about themselves and the world.
The team closely observed residential aged care residents using the app and found that, when they revisited, the residents remembered the researchers and the application.
Ms Salomon’s PhD is under the auspices of Smart Services CRC, and the project is supported by Alzheimer’s Australia.
She will travel to Scotland to present her findings from AVED at the Alzheimer's Europe Conference and the IdeasLab 2014, hosted by the University of Stirling, next month.
Read more about AVED and check out Mandy Salomon’s blog.
