Abstract/Summary

There are over 50 million people with dementia worldwide including 900,000 people in the UK. Dementia is a health condition that can affect the memory, thinking capability, mood, behaviour, orientation, and lifestyle of a person living with it. It is an overall term used to represent a range of progressive disorders that cause damage to the brain. To maintain wellbeing, reduce apathy, and encourage participation in activities outside of a person with dementia’s daily routine, it is important to provide opportunities for engagement in activities such as art, exercise, music, aromatherapy, and reminiscence. There are many very useful interventions, kits and activities on the market that help meet this goal ranging from simple jigsaws and colouring books to highly technical sensory rooms and interactive games. However, whilst each intervention contributes known benefits, there are also some downsides variously attached to them such as: high cost per unit, primary focus on only one element, inability to engage users for a long time, lack of challenges in games and activities, inability to cater to people across different stages of dementia, lack of adaptability as a person’s dementia progresses, and inability to be personalised based on users’ interests. Through working with a group of experts in dementia care and adopting a user-centric Design Thinking approach to the research, this PhD has developed a multisensory toolkit, AMuSED (Active Multi-Sensory Environment for People Living with Dementia) that brings together different aspects of dementia therapy into a single portable box for use by carers, care teams and dementia activity coordinators with people living with dementia to engage and stimulate them physically, mentally, and socially through a combination of sensory elements and themed activities. As well as defining the AMuSED Concept and creating the AMuSED Framework as a way of specifying different AMuSED toolkit themes, four differently themed AMuSED toolkits(Countryside, Seaside, Christmas, and Entertainment) were developed and evaluated in six different care environments during the PhD.