KeepsakeBox: Insertion and Validation of Images in the Platform

Abstract

Dementia is a disease that affects mostly older people and gets worse with age. It is most commonly associated with memory impairments, behavioral changes and other forms of cognitive deficiencies. There is currently no cure for dementia. However, there are treatments that can prove effective in improving the overall health and well-being of people with dementia. One of those treatments is Reminiscence Therapy. It consists of exposing patients to stimuli such as photos, audio and videos, with the aim of helping them relive past experiences and evoke pleasant memories about those events. The objective of this work is to reduce the burden of caregivers preparing reminiscence therapy sessions, since finding media that is relevant to each person with dementia can be time consuming. We built upon the existing KeepsakeBox platform, developed by Santana et al. [16]. It is an application that allows caregivers to register themselves and their patients and conduct reminiscence therapy sessions, among other features. We developed a solution to help caregivers more easily find meaningful images for each individual person with dementia, thus reducing their burden and improving the effectiveness of sessions, since more personalized images are more likely to evoke stronger emotions in people. The mechanisms developed can be divided into three main groups: 1) Requesting images to users outside the platform; 2) Searching for images online using categories; 3) Validating the retrieved images. This will allow caregivers to ask for images directly to friends and family of patients, search for semi-personalized images online automatically, and validate the images retrieved in case any of them are deemed unsafe or inappropriate. We tested the solutions with caregivers and found that the new mechanisms developed were very useful and easy to use for them. Caregivers also showed interest in following the development of the application and using it in the future.