Document type
Conference papers
Document subtype
Poster without full or short paper
Title
A User-Centered Study to Identify Caregivers’ Needs for Assistive Technology to Support Reminiscence Therapy
Participants in the publication
Soraia M. Alarcão (Author)
LASIGE
André Santana (Author)
Bruna Vieites (Author)
Pedro Neves (Author)
Raúl Alves (Author)
Carolina Maruta (Author)
Manuel J. Fonseca (Author)
Dep. Informática
LASIGE
Summary
\\nTitle: A User-Centered Study to Identify Caregivers’ Needs for Assistive Technology to Support Reminiscence Therapy\\nAuthors: Soraia M. Alarcão - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; André Santana - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal; Bruna Vieites - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal; Pedro Neves - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal; Raúl Alves - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal; Carolina Maruta - Laboratório de Estudos de Linguagem, Centro de Estudos Egas Moniz, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal; Manuel J. Fonseca - LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal\\nSession: POS1 Poster presentations - Constanta, 17/10/2022, 15:00 - 17:00\\nBackground: Reminiscence therapy can create engaging communication between people with dementia (PwD) and the rest of the world by using the preserved abilities of long-term memory rather than emphasizing the existing impairments. Caregivers are one of the main pillars in the adoption of digital technologies, as they are responsible for its administration. Despite their comprehensive understanding of the needs and difficulties associated with the therapy, their perspective has not been fully taken into account in the development of existing technological solutions.\\n\\nMethod: To inform the design of novel assistive technological solutions focused on the real needs of caregivers, we followed a user-centered design through worldwide web-based surveys, follow-up interviews, and focus groups. A mixed deductive and inductive thematic analysis was used.\\n\\nResults: A total of 713 informal and 63 formal caregivers participated. Our findings reveal that caregivers need mechanisms to reduce their workload in managing all the tasks involved in the therapy (e.g., creating the sessions, gathering feedback after each session for further consultation, etc). They also want to be able to easily include emotions in the loop during therapy to personalize and diversify sessions over time (e.g., automatically identifying negative emotional reactions to a given stimuli). Such findings were translated into a list of 12 functional requirements for both formal and informal caregivers. With the fulfillment of the identified requirements, we foresee the following outcomes: improvement of the PwD cognitive function, reduction of caregivers’ stress and work, reduction of the PwD behavioral symptoms, and improvement of the relationship between the PwD and caregivers.\\n\\nConclusions: Results indicate the importance of having assistive technologies that aid caregivers to prepare, personalize, diversify, and conduct reminiscence therapy sessions.
Date of Publication
2022-10-17
Event
32th Alzheimer Europe conference
Publication Identifiers
Publisher
Alzheimer Europe