Maggie Ellis Part Two - Audio Transcript

So, one of the main findings from CIRCA was that people with dementia can use a touchscreen, which may not sound like a big deal nowadays, but back in 2001, when everyone thought that people with dementia couldn't learn anything new, that was a huge finding to discover that indeed people can learn how to operate new things and they can also use a touchscreen and it's quite an intuitive system for people to use. I remember someone saying to me, it's just like a big telly. So, it's like you and your friends sitting in front of a TV, but you just touch the TV and it takes you on to different topics.

00:43 
So, we compared CIRCA sessions with what we called traditional reminiscence sessions and in those sessions we asked carers to organise a session, a one-on-one session, where they would choose a subject, they would choose maybe objects and images and pieces of music that the person, they thought the person might enjoy and they conducted a traditional reminiscence session that way and we compared those sessions to CIRCA sessions and after a lot of analysis of videotapes and audiotapes etc, the main findings were that in comparison to traditional reminiscence sessions, CIRCA allowed people with dementia to initiate more often. So, individuals with dementia chose the subject that they wanted to discuss or look at more often. They also initiated more new subject areas than they did in traditional sessions.

01:51 
They also came up with memories, more memories, that the caregiver had never heard before in  CIRCA sessions than in traditional sessions, probably because in the traditional sessions the carer went to a go-to subject that they knew the person would like to discuss, whereas in CIRCA the person was asked to choose which subject areas they would like to discuss and therefore new memories came up and we heard some amazing stories in those CIRCA sessions. We also found that people with dementia found it to be enjoyable. They wanted to keep the system in their daycare service.

02:35 
The music element of CIRCA, providing easily accessible pieces of music, also provided people with dementia who were maybe at a later stage and found it more difficult to have a conversation, a speech-based interaction, than people at earlier stages. We found that the music sessions sections of CIRCA worked really well for the people in the later stages and that really kind of echoes what has just been said in the previous presentation. We found that the music sections made it possible for people with later stage dementia to still interact with the person that they're sitting with but they don't necessarily have to word find or figure out where they are in a conversation or initiate a topic.

03:29 
They can sing together, they can move to music together, they can clap their hands. Lots of people held hands while they listened to music and swayed. It was just absolutely lovely to see.

03:40 
And of course the videos also provided a similar break from speech-based interaction, if you like, if people found it more difficult to engage using speech. These different media provided the means to interact with another individual whilst removing the pressure to actually engage in conversation as we would know it. In terms of the benefits for caregivers, the people that we worked with were professional caregivers and family members and they reported that they enjoyed using the CIRCA system over traditional sessions because of the reasons I gave previously in that it takes the pressure off to try and organise the session to try and think of things to think about.

04:31 
We also found in comparison to the traditional sessions, CIRCA sessions, caregivers asked far fewer questions of people with dementia and there was a lot less speech which meant that there was less pressure to ask questions and to talk. What we found in the traditional sessions was that caregivers, yes they knew the camera was on them and they were under pressure as they were in the CIRCA sessions, but in the traditional sessions they almost looked like an interrogation. Sometimes they almost looked like there were so many questions being fired from the caregivers that they felt they had to keep this conversation going no matter what.

05:20 
We found that that pressure had just gone and that CIRCA almost became a third person or a third element in the interaction and that they could, if there was a silence or a gap, they could then look at the screen together and figure out what else they were going to talk about. So CIRCA was a three-year-long project. Those are the kind of main findings from it.

05:45 
We did eventually turn it into a business and we made and sold CIRCA systems for care homes. Unfortunately someone else produced something similar and we were kind of kicked out of the one of the reasons was that their system was going to be vastly cheaper, but not based on research findings. It was important to us that it was all evidence-based.
Everything that we put on the system was evidence-based.


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