Our research line Accessibility an Ageing, leaded by Tiago Guerreiro and his team: Sérgio Alves, Filipa Brito and Luís Carriço, is working in Biographical and Personalized Cognitive Stimulation.

Findings from their studies with formal and informal caregivers shows that there is a lack of knowledge of nursing home’s staff about their own patients. Sometimes, as it has been told, staff does not know much more about the patients besides the name. This makes it harder for professionals to perform stimulation activities with people with dementia. These activities have a comproved benefit in the quality of life of people with dementia and caregivers and benefit from the usage of biographical materials which are not always easy to obtain. Part of their research is focused on new and optimized ways to collect materials and information to health professionals.

Cognitive stimulation sessions continue to rely on the traditional pencil and paper exercises and general-purpose cognitive computer programs. Informal caregivers also report to perform cognitive stimulation activities at home (46%), with 31.6% doing it 2-3 times a week or more, mainly using paper and pencil exercises (27.7%), or crosswords and Sudoku books (13%). Therefore part of their research is focused on developing new ways to perform traditional cognitive stimulation activities, exploring the potential of digital technologies.

Publications:

Designing Personalized Therapy Tools For People with Dementia, Sérgio Alves, Andreia Cordeiro, Filipa Brito, Luís Carriço, Tiago Guerreiro, 16th International Web for All Conference, San Francisco, USA, May, 2019

Enabling Biographical Cognitive Stimulation for People with Dementia, Sérgio Alves, Andreia Cordeiro, Filipa Brito, Luís Carriço, Tiago Guerreiro, Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal QC, Canada