Maggie Ellis Part Three - Audio Transcript
When the project finished, we then moved on to another EPSRC funded project called Living in the Moment and what we had found in CIRCA, one of the main findings was, as I said previously, that the touchscreen system was an intuitive way for people with dementia to engage. They had no issues with it whatsoever, no one seemed to find it strange, it was just if they needed to be reminded what to do they were encouraged to touch the screen and it was almost like oh it was a real novelty, oh look at that isn't it clever and they really seemed to enjoy it. The Living in the Moment project was almost another arm of CIRCA that we could have included in CIRCA in the future had we kept going with it.
00:48
What we wanted to do with this project was to make the most of the fact that people with dementia often do live exactly in the moment and that what happened five minutes ago is not always accessible to people. That is not taken into consideration obviously, the retained long-term memory that I mentioned earlier, but we wanted to provide a way of engaging people with dementia in the moment that removed the need for caregivers to initiate an activity and that was an issue that we came across time and time again, that caregivers said you know she always wants me to do something, she can't do things for herself, I always have to find things for us to do or for her to do and of course we know that initiation is an issue for people with dementia. So we wanted to find something that people could use intuitively and in the moment and without instruction or prompting from anyone else.
01:52
So we developed this system again on the touchscreen computer that involved games for people to play and these were, these games involved subjects such as we had virtual environments, so we had a game where someone would go into, what do you call it, I forget now, almost like a garden centre where there would be a pool with fish living in the pool and they could go and touch on the fish and feed the fish and look under the water, go around botanic gardens, that's what I mean, you can go around the botanic gardens and look at the different plants, close in, look at butterflies, there was all sorts of things to do and see in the virtual environments. We had a museum as well, at one point we had an activity where you could throw a stick for a dog on the beach, that was one of my personal favourites, where you could take a dog for a walk and if you know if you touched on the screen you could throw a stick and the dog would go and catch the stick and bring it back to you. People were really loving the virtual environment games.
03:04
We also included games of skill, so those were things like a skittle game where you touched on the screen and the ball would go down and knock over the skittles. We also had things like shooting targets, so we had a duck shooting game like you would have at a carnival and so people knocked down the targets or people knocked down ducks, shoot down ducks as they came past the screen. We also had creative activities in that we had a pot painting game where you would have a virtual pot on the screen which would be constantly turning at a very slow pace and you could pick different colours of paint from the paint pot at the bottom of the screen and if you touched the paint pot and then touched the object you would then paint a design or a stripe or you could paint the whole pot in that colour. What we found, the main thing I think we found from this project was that people again were absolutely able to do this.
04:10
We set up a situation where we had in the testing situation we had an individual at the touch screen using it without any instruction so that everything would have to be completely intuitive. We had a webcam set up so that we could watch the person while they were using the system and I was in the next room so if anyone needed any help or wanted to leave I could come in and help them. That never happened.
04:38
What we saw were people engaging with the system time and time again and really enjoying it and over time what we found was that people were improving on their performance on the games so people got faster more accurate at these games and again this goes against the old-fashioned assumption that people with dementia can't learn anything new. So those are the main findings of the projects that I worked on using technology.
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