Clarification of Caring Actions of Patients with Dementia: Necessary for the Development of a Caring-Robot with the Ability to Dialogues

摘要

The aim of this research was to clarify caring actions for patients with dementia conducted by caring professionals, such as nurses and caseworkers, in order to obtain foundational data for the development of a caring-robot with dialogue ability. The subjects were 3 nurses, 5 assistant nurses, and 19 caseworkers working in a nursing institution for the elderly including 12 patients with dementia whose immediate family members gave consent for their participation. The data collection was based on participatory observation. Being as observers, the researchers noted the involvement, actions and situations between the demented patients and the subject personnel. The contents of their conversation were recorded by using an IC-recorder. Additionally, the scenes of their communication were videotaped, and the consideration on their positional relationship and behaviour was made from the contents of the video. As an analysis method, the contents of the observation, the recorded conversation, and the contents of the video were later transcribed to use them as data. Similar contents were categorized or sub-categorized together. Also, the Revised Hasegawa Dementia Scale was used to quantify the degree of the patients' dementia. Then, the quantified degrees of their dementia were divided into 3 stages to consider whether there was a difference in the caring actions of the subject personnel according to the dementia degree. As a result of the analysis, 4 categories in the patients with severe/moderate dementia, 3 categories in the patients with mild dementia, and 23 subcategories were obtained from the caring actions of the subject personnel. Although there was no difference found in the HDS-R of the demented patients depending on the caring actions, it is inferred that as the more the severity of dementia increases, the more necessary non-linguistic caring actions are.