Okay, so first of all, the first question that you sent me was, "How did you come to undertake research into dementia and supporting people with dementia using digital tools and specific communication methods?"  I don't know of any of you have heard me speak in the past, but I usually start my sort of background chat by telling people how I started working with people with dementia in general, because that really is how I got into research.  

00:32 

When I was an undergrad, I knew that I wanted, well I thought, I wanted to become a clinical psychologist when I left university, and I realised that I would need some voluntary work on my CV, and at that point I didn't have any at all, and I really just didn't know what I wanted to do. I had no idea what area I wanted to work in, and I was talking to one of my friends in school about this, and she happened to be a senior social worker for Older People Services in Dundee, and she said, well, why don't you try Alzheimer's Scotland? They're always looking for volunteers, and I thought, well, okay.

01:16 

To my knowledge, I had never met a person with dementia before, but I was willing to go along and give it a try. So the first day I went along to the daycare service, I really was a bit apprehensive because I didn't know what to expect. I had these ideas of what people with dementia would be like, and they ended up being completely wrong, but I went along on this first day really quite nervous, and I kind of hid myself away in the kitchen area, making cups of tea and bits of toast for people, and didn't really engage with what was going on in the daycare service, and I was eventually coaxed through to the day room to join in with whatever was going on there, and I thought, okay, it's time to bite the bullet, and I went through to the day room, and I found that there was a large group of people in a circle doing the hokey-cokey.

02:14 

 So I duly joined in with the hokey-cokey, and from that moment on, I thought this really is,  this is the life for me. I really enjoy this, and I really loved communicating and interacting with people with dementia from that day onwards, and I knew that I wanted to do something in that area with my career. I wasn't quite sure what it was going to be just yet, but I think at that point I realised that I wasn't going to be a clinical psychologist anymore, that probably research was the way I was going to go, and that is indeed what happened.

02:54 

When I graduated from Dundee University, Dundee's mentioned quite a lot of times in this talk. When I graduated, I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for a research assistant post at School of Psychology at St Andrews University, and that research assistant post happened to be for a project called CIRCA, which I will go into a bit more in a minute, but it was advertised as a project where I would be working with people with dementia, and also conducting research, and I thought this is the ideal project for me. I'd really love to get involved in this.

03:42 

However, the post was advertised as a postdoc, so I didn't really think I would have any chance at all of getting this post, having just graduated from an undergraduate degree. However, I ended up getting the job on the strength of my voluntary experience, so the woman who employed me, who happens to be a collaborator to this day, Professor Arlene Estelle, reckoned that it was possible to teach people how to conduct research, I mean all that stuff you can teach, but she liked the fact that I already had experience of communicating with people with dementia, and finding different strategies to make that possible. So I was duly employed on the CIRCA project for three years, it was funded by EPSRC, and CIRCA stands for Communication, Interactive, Reminiscence and Conversation Aid, and the idea behind CIRCA was that it would  maximise the retained skills of people with dementia, in terms of relatively well spared long-term memory, and retained communication skills.

05:00 

And CIRCA would be based on a touch screen computer, so this was in 2001, I mean it was a million years ago in technology terms, and at this point touch screen computers were exceptionally expensive, so I was carrying, lugging around this huge touch screen, it was worth an absolute fortune, to these care homes to try out the system with people. So, to tell you a little bit about what CIRCA did, it's a touch screen system, and it was designed for people with dementia to sit with their family members or caregivers, it was supposed to be a one-on-one session to begin with, and included in the system was photographs, video clips and pieces of music, and the person with dementia was always offered a choice between photographs, video clips, music, and they were also always offered a choice of subject area, so in the early days we had subjects such as childhood, local life, sports etc, we had sort of very sort of narrow categories in the early days.

06:21 

And we wanted to develop the system not only to provide a way for people with dementia to engage with their caregivers, we also had seen in our previous work, and certainly in the literature review part of the project, was that caregivers employed in daycare services and care homes found it really difficult to organise reminiscent sessions for people with dementia, basically because they tended to conduct these sessions in group settings, so therefore trying to find a subject that suits everyone in a group, and both sexes, wasn't always easy.

07:05 

Locating the items that you would discuss, so for example trying to locate objects or images or pieces of music etc, that would be relevant to the topic or that would get people talking, is really really difficult, and it's really pressured, the situation, because as an activities coordinator or a carer, if you're conducting a session like that and it just isn't working and people aren't talking, then you're kind of stuck with it really, because you've organised the session thinking okay these objects are likely to work or they might work, and if it doesn't work and people aren't engaging, then what on earth do you do with that situation? So CIRCA provided a nice sort of neat tidy system where there was no organisation involved on the part of the caregiver, all the materials were already in there and the subject matter was guided by the person with dementia.

08:06 

So the way it was set up was that the caregiver would always invite the person with dementia to look at the topics they were interested in, look at the different types of media they were interested in, and it was never really led by the caregivers. So that was the idea behind it to begin with, and of course it takes advantage of the retained communication skills, and we know that reminiscent sessions work really well for people with dementia because it provides a bit of a more level playing field for individuals with dementia to have a conversation with someone because they are discussing things that they remember from their long-term memory, rather than something that maybe happened yesterday or last week that they are probably unlikely to remember.

08:55 

So we thought that this system would support conversation between people with dementia and their caregivers, and we really did manage to get together an extensive collection of archive photographs, video clips and music that people could really just access by touching the screen.

09:16 

So this was a three-year-long project and it was an iterative process in that we would try a pilot version and we would take that out into care homes into daycare services, and we would tweak the system depending on what we found and what people liked and what people didn't like, and we always always included people with dementia in those decision processes, and caregivers of course.

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