Recommending video content for use in group-based reminiscence therapy

REMPAD is a semi-automated cloud-based system used to facilitate digital reminiscence therapy for patients with mild-to-moderate dementia, enacted in a group setting. REMPAD uses profiles for participants and groups to proactively recommend interactive video content from the Internet to match these profiles. In this chapter, we focus on the design of the system and then the system architecture, the system build, data curation, and usage scenarios. We also report a series of steps carried out as part of our user-centered design approach to system development, and a series of analyses on interaction logs which indicate various levels of effectiveness for different configurations of the recommendation algorithm we use. The results indicate high user satisfaction when using the system, and strong tendency towards repeated use in future

Design and field evaluation of REMPAD: a recommender system supporting group reminiscence therapy

This paper describes a semi-automated web-based system to facilitate digital remi-niscence therapy for patients with mild-to-moderate dementia, enacted in a group setting. The system, REMPAD, uses proactive recommendation technology to profile participants and groups, and offers interactive multimedia content from the Internet to match these profiles. In this paper, we focus on the design of the system to deliver an innovative personalized group reminiscence experience. We take a user-centered design approach to discover and address the design challenges and considerations. A combination of methodologies is used throughout this research study, including exploratory interviews, prototype use case walkthroughs, and field evaluations. The results of the field evaluation indicate high user satisfaction when using the system, and strong tendency towards repeated use in future. These studies provide an insight into the current practices and challenges of group reminiscence therapy, and inform the design of a multimedia recommender system to support facilitators and group therapy participants

Automatically recommending multimedia content for use in group reminiscence therapy

This paper presents and evaluates a novel approach for automatically recommending multimedia content for use in group reminiscence therapy for people with Alzheimer's and other dementias. In recent years recommender systems have seen popularity in providing a personalised experience in information discovery tasks. This personalisation approach is naturally suited to tasks in healthcare, such as reminiscence therapy, where there has been a trend towards an increased emphasis on person-centred care. Building on recent work which has shown benefits to reminiscence therapy in a group setting, we develop and evaluate a system, REMPAD, which profiles people with Alzheimer's and other dementias, and provides multimedia content tailored to a given group context. In this paper we present our system and approach, and report on a user trial in residential care settings. In our evaluation we examine the potential to use early-aggregation and late-aggregation of group member preferences using case-based reasoning combined with a content-based method. We evaluate with respect to accuracy, utility and perceived usefulness. The results overall are positive and we find that our best-performing approach uses early aggregation CBR combined with a content-based method. Also, under different evaluation criteria, we note different performances, with certain configurations of our approach providing better accuracy and others providing better utility

Health Educ Behav

As the segment of the population 65 years of age or older continues to grow, the number of individuals with dementia increases proportionally, highlighting the need to design therapies that meet the social and emotional needs of people with dementia. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are potential venues for supporting the delivery of such therapies, including reminiscence therapy (RT), which is a non-pharmacological intervention involving the prompting of past memories, often with artifacts such as old photographs or music for therapeutic benefits such as the facilitation of social interactions or the increase of self-esteem. This paper systematically examines the scientific literature on the use of ICT for facilitating RT to assess the current state of the evidence and identify future trends. We searched the PubMed (1966-2013), ACM (1954-2013), and PsycINFO (1908-2013) repositories using the keywords dementia and reminiscence. Three hundred eighty-six articles were retrieved, 44 of which met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Findings of the systematic review include that there are benefits to using ICT for RT interventions. Some of these benefits are access to rich and engaging multimedia reminiscence materials, opportunities for people with dementia to participate in social interactions and take ownership of conversations, and a reduction of barriers due to motor deficits during interactions with media. Future studies should explore the types and content of media beneficial to individuals at different stages of dementia.T15 LM007442/LM/NLM NIH HHS/United StatesU38 HM000454/HM/NCHM CDC HHS/United States2T15LM007442/LM/NLM NIH HHS/United States2016-04-26T00:00:00Z25274711PMC484484

Practice Links [Issue 53, June 2013]

Practice Links is a free e-publication for practitioners working in Irish social services, voluntary and nongovernmental sectors. Practice Links was created to enable practitioners to keep up-to-date with new publications, electronic resources and conference opportunities. Issue 53 includes reviews of research on medication for schizophrenia and the impact of housing improvements on health

I-care-an interaction system for the individual activation of people with dementia

I-CARE is a hand-held activation system that allows professional and informal caregivers to cognitively and socially activate people with dementia in joint activation sessions without special training or expertise. I-CARE consists of an easy-to-use tablet application that presents activation content and a server-based backend system that securely manages the contents and events of activation sessions. It tracks various sources of explicit and implicit feedback from user interactions and different sensors to estimate which content is successful in activating individual users. Over the course of use, I-CARE’s recommendation system learns about the individual needs and resources of its users and automatically personalizes the activation content. In addition, information about past sessions can be retrieved such that activations seamlessly build on previous sessions while eligible stakeholders are informed about the current state of care and daily form of their protegees. In addition, caregivers can connect with supervisors and professionals through the I-CARE remote calling feature, to get activation sessions tracked in real time via audio and video support. In this way, I-CARE provides technical support for a decentralized and spontaneous formation of ad hoc activation groups and fosters tight engagement of the social network and caring community. By these means, I-CARE promotes new care infrastructures in the community and the neighborhood as well as relieves professional and informal caregivers

A Nursing Education Program to Decrease Use of Psychotropics Among Dementia Patients

Dementia, a clinical condition that affects the psychological ability of patients, is distinguished by a significant overall decline in cognitive function that results in distorted perception. Guiding nursing practice in the long-term care (LTC) setting to decrease the unnecessary use of psychotropics is critical because doing so relates to the patients\u27 quality of life and safety. In the LTC facility that served as the practicum site for this study, there was an observed overuse of psychotropic medications in the care of patients with dementia. The practice-focused question guiding this project asked whether a nursing staff development program would decrease the use of psychotropics in dementia patients. The purpose of the project was to inform nursing staff through an educational program on alternative methods to use when dementia patients exhibit increased disturbing behaviors. The conceptual framework for the project was the knowledge-to-action model. The nursing staff development program had a positive effect on the nursing staff as evidenced by a statistically significant improvement in knowledge and attitudes about the use of psychotropics in caring for dementia patients. The use of psychotropic in the dementia patient decreased from 22.32% to 15.77%, the lowest score achieved by the organization in 5 years. The dementia patients benefited from this project and its positive social change implications for nursing practice by decreasing dementia patients use of psychotropics, minimizing their side effects to the patients and providing an overall feeling of well-being

Health recommender system design in the context of CAREGIVERSPRO-MMD project

CAREGIVERSPRO-MMD an EU H2020 funded project aims to build a digital platform focusing on people living with dementia and their caregivers, offering a selection of advanced, individually tailored services enabling them to live well in the community for as long as possible. This paper provides an outline of a health recommender system designed in the context of the project to provide tailored interventions to caregivers and people living with dementia.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version