A Computational Model of Analogical Reasoning in Dementia Care

This paper reports a practical application of a computational model of analogical reasoning to a pressing social problem, which is to improve the care of older people with dementia. Underpinning the support for carers for people with dementia is a computational model of analogical reasoning that retrieves information about cases from analogical problem domains. The model implements structure-mapping theory adapted to match source and target domains expressed in unstructured natural language. The model is implemented as a computational service invoked by a mobile app used by carers during their care shifts. Dementia Care and Creativity Dementia is a condition related to ageing. After the age of 65 the proportion of people with dementia doubles for every 5 years of age so that one fifth of people over the age of 85 are affected (Alzheimers Society 2010). This equates to a current total of 750,000 people in the UK with dementia, a figure projected to double by 2051 when it is predicted to affect a third of the population either as a sufferer, relative or carer (Wimo and Prince 2010). Dementia care is often delivered in residential homes. In the UK, for example, two in three of all home residents have some form of dementia (e.g. Wimo and Prince 2010), and delivering the required care to them poses complex and diverse problems carers that new software technologies have the potential to overcome. However, this potential is still to be tapped. The prevailing paradigm in dementia care is personcentered care. This paradigm seeks an individualized approach that recognizes the uniqueness of each resident and understanding the world from the perspective of the person with dementia (Brooker 2007). It can offer an important role for creative problem solving that produces novel and useful outcomes (Sternberg 1999), i.e. care activities that both recognize a sense of uniqueness and are new to the care of the resident and/or carer. However, there is little explicit use of creative problem solving in dementia care, let alone with the benefits that technology can provide. Therefore, the objective of our research was to enable more creative problem solving in dementia care through new software technologies. This paper reports two computational services developed to support carers to manage challenging behaviors in person-centered dementia care – a computational analogical matching service that retrieves similar challenging behavior cases in less-constrained domains, and a second service that automatically generates creativity prompts based on the computed analogical mappings. Both are delivered to carers through a mobile software app. The next two sections summarize results from one pre-design study that motivates the role of analogical matching in managing challenging behavior in dementia care then describe the two computational creativity services.