Diego Muñoz

Technologies can support the well-being of people living with dementia in residential care by fostering meaningful interactions through multimodal and playful features. This article presents the evaluation of A Better Visit, an app that aims at engaging residents and visitors in shared activities. We define engagement in terms of dyadic interactions with the interface of the device, and interactions within the social context of the care home. We generated two Motivational Models that describe different perspectives of how people engaged with the system: the first was built with the design team, and the second was built using the first Motivational Model as a sensitising concept for the analysis of data from four care homes that used the app for periods of three months. Our findings show that the facilitation of activities plays a relevant role for engaging in social interaction. We discuss how technologies can contribute to engaging people living with dementia in social interaction: firstly, facilitation can be understood as a concept that is supported by people and technology. Secondly, we discuss the influence of the social context of the setting and the understandings of the individual in how people assess the engagement of the residents in social interaction.

Everyday practices, including technology use, by older adults can significantly change during important life transitions. However, technologies do not always match their evolving needs. This paper examines how older adults reconfigure everyday technology use when navigating major life transitions in later life. We have engaged with fifteen participants living in residential care settings for three years in weekly group activities and individual visits. Through deep and meaningful collaborations, we got to know these residents and their life circumstances closely. We created detailed narratives of the technology use experiences of five residents applying a Narrative Inquiry approach. The narratives focused on how residents adapted their technology practices and devices over time while dealing with significant changes in their everyday lives. Then, we complemented the Narrative Inquiry with a Reflexive Thematic Analysis of the data across the fifteen residents. Our findings show that older adults developed changing technology needs for two main reasons: firstly, to cope with the immediate consequences of the transitions and secondly, to improve entering the new stage of their lives by discovering or maintaining their interests through technology. We propose exploring suitable choices for technologies with older adults that provide continuity and extend their experiences with technology use during transitions. These technologies should enable positive and enriching experiences and counterbalance unsettling feelings and the struggles of change. Our research contributes an understanding of how technologies might support the life transitions of older adults in considering both their individual experiences and the role of wider social networks.