Enabling Biographical Cognitive Stimulation for People with Dementia

摘要

Non-pharmacological interventions are the most common and arguably most effective for people with dementia. Some of these approaches have been proven to benefit from the usage of biographical or personalized materials. These contents are not always easy to obtain. Alongside, it is a challenge to maintain awareness of what is meaningful for a certain person. Faced with an absence of tools to collect and manage biographical materials, we created a web platform that supports the work of psychologists, streamlining the collection of relevant information about people with dementia. This knowledge is then used as a starting point to perform reminiscence and other biographical cognitive stimulation practices. In this paper, we present the design of our platform and results from a case study with one psychologist and three patients, across a period of two weeks that showed improvements in the collection of meaningful data about a person, and on maintaining awareness of the therapy as a whole.