A Library of Old Photos Supporting Conversation of Two Generations Serving Reminiscence Therapy

Abstract

In Japan, a shift in family patterns has led to a sense of social isolation among older people, which increases the risk of major neurocognitive disorder. Interventions for them using old photos to implement reminiscence therapy (RT) have been proved to be effective. A super-aged society has in turn led to a shortage of medical resources and older people prefer home care over institutional care. Therefore, there is an urgent need for volunteers to help in RT. However, the age of volunteers tends to be increasingly younger. The lack of knowledge and experience of the past for the young volunteers makes it difficult for them to select appropriate stimulated materials. To improve this situation, a library of old photos for RT was developed to support conversation between the two generations. A two-factor experiment and emotion assessment scales were designed to explore the effect of different old photo types on the fluency of conversation between the two generations and their emotion. It was found that the types of old photos have little effect on older people and that conversations were almost pleasant. However, the pleasantness of older people was enhanced when using photos that they wanted to talk about (P = 0.006). Meanwhile, pleasure in conversation of the older people increased with the attention of the young people to the topic (R = 0.304, p < 0.001). Conversely, photo type has a strong impact on young people. When photos are selected that older people do not want to talk about or photos that young people do not know the content and are not interested in, concern for the topic of young people drops dramatically. Therefore, when RT, it is important to avoid using the types of photos above that cause a drop in younger people's attention.

Emotion Recognition Using Electroencephalography Signals of Older People for Reminiscence Therapy

“…They will talk around each RT material for 1 min and collect EEG signals from older people. In addition, in the same period of work (Jiang et al, 2021), we found that no statistically significant difference in the personal preference (liking and familiarity) of photos for the older people on the pleasantness of the conversation. Therefore the personal preference on photos was not taken into account as EEG features when evaluating conversation emotion.…”

Editorial for advances in human-centred dementia technology

“…To aid reminiscence therapy, libraries of stimulus (i.e. old pictures) are used to trigger memories and stimulate relevant and meaningful conversation between PwD and caregivers (Jiang et al, 2021). As such, research within the HCI community has investigated presenting stimulus using various technologies such as smartphone Apps (Ekström et al, 2017), projectors or large displays (Sas et al, 2020;, head-mounted VR (Afifi et al, 2022(Afifi et al, , 2021Hodge et al, 2018;Moyle et al, 2018;Rose et al, 2019a;Tabbaa et al, 2019), and interactive intelligent interfaces (i.e.…”