Aware Group Home: Person-Centered Care as Creative Problem Solving

The population of elderly is rapidly increasing in Japan and we expect that one fourth of our population are older than sixty-five years in 2020, which amounts to thirty five million people. The number of people with dementia, who need some types of care, is then estimated to be about three million, which occupies eight percent of elderly people. The change suggests that we can no longer hospitalize them, but have to find some way to go along with them at home. Group Home is a type of caregiving for the elderly with dementia, where a small group of people with dementia, normally limited to five to nine, live together in a house and live their lives at their best with a help from caregivers. Group Home is thought to be ideal form of caregiving in the sense that the inhabitants can keep their contacts with the locals to feel at home. Managing Group Home may, however, often run into troubles due to the cognitive asymmetry between the elderly with dementia and caregivers. The cognitive world of people with dementia is often inaccessible from cognitively normal people. Some people with dementia have provided us with their own witness[Boden 04], helping us understand what they think and how they feel. We are, however, afraid that they are rather exceptional. Most caregivers are often stunned at the strange behaviours of people with dementia, being unable to understand what they are doing. We address in this paper the problems we found in the communication between the people with dementia and caregivers and present design principles for Aware Group Home, which enhances the awareness of caregivers towards people with dementia using information technologies. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 addresses the problem in communication with people with dementia. Following sections 3 and 4 present our attempt to get an access to cognitive world of people with dementia. Section 5 explains some results and Section 6 makes our approach clear.