Resparke Technology trading as Moove & Groove in partnership with Twilight Aged Care and the Australian Catholic University has been awarded an ARIIA grant for their project ‘Develop technology to facilitate staff and resident connection to deliver personalised reminiscing at scale for those living with dementia’.
Exceptional care results when there is a close relationship between the carer and the person to be cared for. Knowing someone's preferences facilitates personalised reminiscing for people living with dementia (PLWD). It is challenging for residents and staff to get to know each other rapidly, especially if they have different cultural backgrounds, language, limited one-to-one time together and residents have impaired cognition.
Moove & Groove (MG) is a world first program used by approximately 250 Australian care homes and 2000 care staff. It enables staff to select appropriate content from thousands of playlists, videos and podcasts and is delivered via tablets and wireless headphone technology. The challenge for staff has been having sufficient profile information at their fingertips to start conversations and select content. Australian Catholic University (ACU) have demonstrated that manual collection and personalisation of a resident’s MG preferences reduces ‘as needed psychotropic’ medications by 12%, and behaviours of concern by 70%. Currently personalisation is done manually by MG staff.
The project’s aim is to use technology to scale the ACU pilot to streamline and automate data collection and matching processes to personalise interactions at scale, facilitate better relationships, and in turn reduce behaviours of concern.
