Designing games for dementia care at pre and early stages

Abstract

Dementia is emerging as a major public health concern. Nevertheless, it is still very challenging to the families of people who are diagnosed with dementia - especially the main carers, as the stereotype of dementia in society remains negative. Games for family carers of patients at pre- and early-stages of dementia are designed to engage people, and are valued for their educational benefits, health benefits and community enhancing merits. A conceptual framework is proposed in this thesis to help develop these types of games to support family carers of patients at pre- and early-stages of dementia. The aim of the research is to increase knowledge of health issues in order to help maintain the relationship between patients and carers, since the quality of this relationship will have an effect on both of them. By playing the games, carers can understand more about their patients to change their behaviour and thoughts so they can better support them.

The game-based methods for dementia carers include social marketing, knowledge transfer, social media connections and game involvement. The research methods used to test this hypothesis include expert interviews and games analysis. Expert interviews were conducted with a sample of professionals, including organisations and academia, to address the two main areas: carers and digital technologies. The games analysis involved using measures of the effectiveness of the game’s purpose, such as games for health, games for education and social games. Metric instruments were developed to measure the game’s purpose. Exploratory experiments were performed on a selection of games using experienced gaming professionals.

The game Make a cup of tea was designed and developed based on the framework and the exploratory experiments results. The use of Make a cup of tea showed improvements to the quality of life of family carers of patients at pre- and early-stages of dementia. This thesis will contribute to the research on dementia family carers through several aspects: the proposed framework will serve as a proven theoretical concept for future research; the metric instruments provide benchmarking measures for health-based games; Make a cup of tea educates and enlightens dementia family carers through in-game experiences. The aim of the project is to help maintain the relationship between dementia patients and their carers which heavily influences the quality of life for both parties. From the design aspect, this project aims to explore ways to design games for dementia research purposes.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

ORCID for Ashokkumar Ranchhod: orcid.org/0000-0003-4269-8825

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