Challenges in Technology-Mediated NPI for Dementia
Technology-Mediated Non-pharmacological Interventions for Dementia: Needs for and Challenges in Professional, Personalized and Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Interventions
Technology-Mediated Non-pharmacological Interventions for Dementia: Needs for and Challenges in Professional, Personalized and Multi-Stakeholder Collaborative Interventions
Designing and using technologies to support Non-Pharmacological Interventions (NPI) for People with Dementia (PwD) has drawn increasing attention in HCI, with the potential expectations of higher user engagement and positive outcomes. Yet, technologies for NPI can only be valuable if practitioners successfully incorporate them into their ongoing intervention practices beyond a limited research period. Currently, we know little about how practitioners experience and perceive these technologies in practical NPI for PwD. In this paper, we investigate this question through observations of fve in-person NPI activities and interviews with 11 therapists and 5 caregivers. Our fndings elaborate the practical NPI workfow process and characteristics, and practitioners’ attitudes, experiences, and perceptions to technology-mediated NPI in practice. Generally, our participants emphasized practical NPI is a complex and professional practice, needing fne-grained, personalized evaluation and planning, and the practical executing process is situated, and multistakeholder collaborative. Yet, existing technologies often fail to consider these specifc characteristics, which leads to limitations in practical efectiveness or sustainable use. Drawing on our fndings, we discuss the possible implications for designing more useful and practical NPI intervention technologies.
Dementia is a chronic syndrome characterized by a decline in cognitive function beyond normal aging, afecting memory, thinking, behavior, and social abilities over time.In the feld of HCI, using technologies to support NPI for PwD has drawn increasing attention. While studies provide the worth-expecting vision for technology-mediated NPIs, most of existing technologies are still in the prototype design and evaluation phases, involving brief testing for a short time rather than applying them in real worldTo date, very little is published on the usage and evaluation of NPI technologies in realworld NPI scenarios beyond a limited research period. This research gap is critical because researchers and designers need an in-depth understanding of how to appropriately implement NPI technologies to increase user acceptance and system uptake.
We conducted a multi-phase qualitative study, including observations of practical NPI practices and semi-structured interviews with 16 NPI practitioners (11 therapists and 5 caregivers). Therapist here refers to the trained professional who provides therapeutic interventions or treatments to PwDs, and caregiver refers to the professional care provider, who provides care and assistance to PwDs. During our study, we didn’t specify what kinds of technologies our participants have used so that our fndings could be open to technologies with various levels in our targeted technology-mediated NPI practices.
We began with the observations of in-person NPI activities, with the purpose of obtaining frsthand insights into NPI practices for PwDs in real-world NPI scenarios.Table 1 shows details of the observed fve activities. The duration of each activity was approximately 40 minutes.
To deeply understand NPI practitioners’ practical experiences of using technologies to support NPIs, and their attitudes, perceptions and expectations of technology-mediated NPI, we then conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 NPI practitioners (11 therapists and 5 caregivers). The probes used in interview were listed in Table 3.
According to our research questions, we present the key fndings from the following four aspects (as shown in Fig. 1): (1) activities and existing used technologies in practical non-pharmacological interventions (NPI), (2) challenges for PwDs to adopting and engaging into technology-mediated NPI, (3) challenges of technologies in supporting professional, personalized, situated, and multi-Stakeholder engaged NPIs, and (4) practitioners’ expectations for technologies that can better support their practical NPI process.
Yuling Sun, Zhennan Yi, Xiaojuan Ma, Junyan Mao, and Xin Tong. (2024)
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 218, 1–19.
