Enriching everyday lived experiences in dementia care

Research in HCI is increasingly investigating the role of technology in supporting meaningful and social activities to enhance the lived experiences of people with dementia. However, to further enrich the daily experiences in care, more insight is needed into how technology can directly promote social participation and pleasurable experiences in everyday care situations. This paper discusses the deployment of VITA and SAM: two research products that address the social and emotional needs of residents in day-to-day dementia care. We report how both products offered aesthetic and sensory enrichment, created new experiences in the everyday, and were integrated into the care environment. Furthermore, we identify implications for design to provide: 1) aesthetics in care, 2) authentic experiences, 3) reinforcing everyday life, and 4) community-driven use in practice. We contribute to existing research by demonstrating how technology for dementia care can transcend instrumental use and culminate in warm-felt everyday experiences

Harry Partch: A Catalyst for Queer Compositionism

My encounter with Harry Partch - mediated through recordings, films, and sleeve photographs - is taken as an interpellative hail (Althusser, 2014) to inquire into his legacy. As a queer musician, I re-articulate Partch’s volatility and (apparent) inability to collaborate, positing that he presented his personhood as hybridised with his self-built instruments, precarious home-studios, audio equipment, microtonal systems, published writings, records, sleeve notes, etc. I champion this hybridised personhood as a queer expression of his epistemology of the closet (Sedgwick, 2008), asking whether this notion applies to what I have coined a queer compositionist stance in collaborative performance projects. Partch collaborated intimately with the human and nonhuman agents (Latour, 2007) that he assembled into his life’s work. I see his protectionism of this assemblage not simply as outsiderism, but as a queer utopian message to arm oneself against the inertia (Becker, 1995) of normalising forces. A methodology centred around Bruno Latour supports this notion. In this regard, I follow the lead of Benjamin Piekut’s scholarship on musical experimentalism. I ask whether the kind of networked hybridity that Latour has us pay attention to could relate to queer negotiations of the closet. Can a re-articulation of Harry Partch’s life’s work as a mediation of his personhood foreground ephemeral evidence (Muñoz 1996) of his ambivalent use of outsider labels? How can this speculation be used as a catalyst for a queer orientation of collaborative performance projects? The queer Partch that emerges from these questions haunts a series of collaborative performance projects that have offered practice-based contexts for an enquiry into my proposed queer compositionist stance. This stance foregrounds a quiet insistence on project-specific musical principles, not based on authorial signature, but on closet-like assemblages of conceptually integrated elements. In my accounts of the project’s developments, I have exposed queer compositionism as offering a unique contribution to hauntological approaches to music production

Noise environments in nursing homes : an overview of the literature and a case study in Flanders with quantitative and qualitative methods

As noise is a basic contributor to the evaluation of an environment, the indoor environment of a nursing home (where residents are provided with 24-hour functional support and care) is studied with this focus. General research results, as indicated from a literature review, are limited. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, five nursing homes in Flanders were studied before and after acoustic interventions. Sound levels were measured in individual bedrooms, living rooms and corridors to obtain the typical levels during a day. Acoustic intra-room performance parameters (reverberation time) and inter-room performance parameters (airborne noise insulation level and impact noise insulation level) were measured and compared with Belgian target values. The post operam measurements indicated the potential of the acoustic interventions (use of acoustic curtains, wall and ceiling panels, ventilation grills, floating floors) to improve the building performance and the acoustic climate. From a qualitative viewpoint, the thematic analysis of staff response to the acoustic interventions indicated direct positive outcomes (e.g., more pleasant, quieter indoor soundscapes) with both positive and negative outcomes from perceived indirect effects (i.e., non-acoustic factors)

Within moments of becoming—everyday citizenship in nursing homes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Background: Humans are occupational beings. Our occupational choices depend on the opportunities available to us, and within nursing homes, institutional rules or structures may limit occupational engagement. An everyday citizenship lens acknowledges the importance of people’s rights as citizens as well as engagement in mundane aspects of the everyday, highlighting diverse expressions of agency. Aims/objectives: To show how older residents living with dementia in nursing homes can realize their everyday citizenship. Methods: A phenomenologically inspired ethnographic study was conducted in nursing home units in Norway, exploring everyday citizenship through narrative analysis. Results: Within everyday environments of care, the narratives of May, Janne and Camilla tell stories of spontaneous initiatives towards contribution and responsibilities, highlighting their continuous occupational natures. Conclusion: Becoming can be seen as constitutive of self and identity, through residents’ actions and contributions within the mundane and ordinary of everyday life, as an essential part of everyday citizenship. Significance for practice: A citizenship of becoming presupposes that institutional perceptions of activities being offered ought to be broadened towards supporting residents’ natural desires to do and act within the mundane and ordinary of everyday life.publishedVersio

'All the world's a stage': Accounting for the dementia experience - insights from the IDEAL study

YesQualitative dementia research emphasises the importance of recognising the voice of the person with dementia. However, research imbued with a politics of selfhood, whereby individuals are called upon to give coherence to experience and emotion, jars with representations of dementia as a gradual decline in capacity. Moreover, it reinforces an assumption that there is an essential experience that can be accessed through different methods. Drawing on Atkinson and Silverman, we view the interview not as confessional but rather as an outcome of social interaction. This paper draws on qualitative interviews from the Improving the Experince of Dementia and Enhancing Active Life (IDEAL) study, to focus specifically on the forms of accounting and storytelling of people living with dementia and how these are produced through the course of the interview encounter. Extracts from our interviews highlight key aspects of this interactional process: (a) social conventions and temporality, (b) self presentation and identity work, (c) accounts and wider cultural meanings. To conclude, we suggest that qualitative research with people with dementia requires a reframing of both the interview encounter and interpretive practices.The IDEAL study’ was funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) through grant ES/L001853/2 ‘Improving the experience of dementia and enhancing active life: living well with dementia

Playing with Distinction? Music Therapy and the Affordances of Improvisation

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the link in this record.In the United Kingdom (UK), improvisation seems to be regarded as central to, and even defnitional of, the practice of music therapy. This article considers reasons why improvisation might be professionally prized in this way but also turns to Tia DeNora's (2003) notion of musical afordance to consider what in practical terms improvisation may have to ofer within music therapy practice, focusing on two vignettes from a mental health environment

Humour in music therapy:A narrative literature review

Introduction: Humour is a highly prevalent but little understood phenomenon. In music therapy, experiences of humour are not well documented yet anecdotally widespread. Method: A narrative literature review was conducted to identify, critically analyse and synthesise literature related to humour in music therapy. Literature was limited to accessible publications in the English language and sourced from multiple music therapy journals, bibliographic databases, electronic databases and books from the earliest available date until June 2018 using the key terms of humour/humor. Results: Two empirical research studies that focussed on humour in music therapy were identified and references to humour were found in over 130 articles. Humour in music therapy was evidently taken for granted as a phenomenon with relationship-building effects. In addition, references to humour came overwhelmingly from music therapists’ point of view. Despite one comprehensive research study exploring humour in music therapy, a lack of investigation into reciprocal experiences of humour and how this is “played out” through improvisation was identified. Discussion: This review surfaces a phenomenon that is ubiquitous yet under-researched in music therapy. In general, a kind of insider knowledge appears necessary for humour to be shared; yet the ambiguity inherent in humour means that music therapists can encounter risk in using or engaging with it in their work. These findings have led directly to further research into reciprocal embodied experiences of humour and improvisation in music therapy.https://doi.org/10.1080/08098131.2019.157728828pubpub