Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

In reIieving Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD) in dementia sufferers, nonpharmacological therapies, mainly communicative methodologies, have been recognized effective. Among all, Validation Therapy (VT), Person-centered care (PCC) and Humanitude have gained favors in many respects. Although different from each other, these three methods all insist that people should be treated as individuals, in other words, dementia should be seen as part of people rather than as defining their identity. This research probes into the philosophy as well as implementation procedures of the three dementia care methods, in order to clarify their advantages and uniqueness corresponding to various caring scenes, and to figure out whether by any chances that the three methods could learn from each other’s strong points to offset their weaknesses respectively, and eventually to establish an integrated new dementia care method for elderly people. Meanwhile, reckoning the quality of care has always been a very subjective evaluation. Comparing with medical field services, which are nowadays widely managed digitally such as under circumstances of injection and prescription and so on, and can be easily assessed by various indicators, however, ‘good care’ seems difficult to be defined in an objective way, especially for persons with dementia. To achieve the goal of quantitative management of dementia care, this research explores the characteristics of behaviors of dementia sufferers, confirming adequate determinant factors, such as observables’ facial expression, body movement, language usage, etc. by applying image recognition and natural language processing technologies to caring scenes.