Hello everyone, my name is Diego Muñoz and on behalf of our team from the Swinburne University
of Technology I am presenting our paper "Evaluating an App to Promote a Better Visit
Through Shared Activities for People Living with Dementia and their Families". This work is about
the evaluation of a co-designed app with eight games that provide cooperative and competitive
activities to promote shared interactions with people living with dementia and a visitor or
staff. Over a period of one year, the app was trialed in four residential care centers
where we left iPads with the app installed. The participants were mostly living with moderate and
advanced dementia according to the assessment by the care staff. We conducted gameplay sessions,
observations, interviews with visitors and staff members and we logged usage data of the games to
get an understanding of how people use the app. In our research, we aimed to understand how the games
could help identify the interests of the residents to provide person-centered care and to investigate
how technology can foster meaningful interactions with the residents through game activities.
When analyzing the quantitative data, we observed that the game preferences changed over time.
The graph on the left side shows the game preferences for different months. The blue color
shows a big spike on "Washing Windows", a game where you clean a foggy window
by wiping the screen to reveal a photograph of a place of interest,
for example, the Sydney Opera House. However, the following month, represented in yellow,
shows that "Co-Colouring", a game that is quite similar to "Washing Windows", and Tic-Tac-Tango,
a Tic-Tac-Toe game that adds musical loops after each move, were the preferred games.
This opens up new questions: how can the games promote a person-centered focus?
Can we understand the likes and preferences of people living with dementia through games?
And in terms of the progress of dementia, can we understand how their skills change over time?
In relation to shared interactions, we identified repetitive patterns and exploration
of the interface. This is represented in these two diagrams of the game "Traces",
which shows colorful and sparkling lines that follow the path of the fingers on the screen.
The image above shows what appears to be a letter "M", which was the initial of the name
of a relative. The image below shows a repetitive star pattern. However, in quantifying the use of
the app, we found several challenges: who is interacting with the interface? How can we log
this information more precisely without affecting the ease of use of the games for people living
with dementia and their carers? Then, based on the quantitative data, we can make statements about
the person-centered care, but fewer conclusions on the shared interactions and their quality.
Our qualitative data allowed us to explore the relationship further. We identified different
modes of interaction that visitors and carers used to facilitate the interactions with the device.
We observed that there was stimulation for mimicking the use of the app,
as in the diagram with the letter "M", guidance by showing how to touch the screen and do patterns,
such as in the star diagram, or even moving the hand of the person
living with dementia over the screen as in this photo.
We also observed that the competition and collaboration of the design of the games was not
always conceived as such by our participants. For example, some participants played
"Tic-Tac-Tango" just to listen to the music. There were also carers that gave people living
with dementia an opportunity to win, just to learn that they actually lost for real in the next game.
In hindsight, we underestimated the influence that the human relationship between a visitor
or carer and the person living with dementia has on the success of the interactions with the app.
This shows that there are plenty of opportunities to investigate how to support this relationship
through technologies. To conclude, in this work we show how an evaluation that uses mixed methods
can help build a better understanding of this human relationship. More importantly,
we highlight how two people interacting with a single device can create opportunities for
starting conversations, to remember previous experiences and to enjoy time together.
This work had many challenges and leaves several open questions:
how can we improve the logging to quantify the shared interactions with a single device?
What role does the carer play when using the app? How do we assess that
the person living with dementia is engaging in social interaction? Thank you very much.