It’s the holiday season, which is also arguably the busiest time of the year. This season is no different-- but it came with early presents and hopes for the future! Looking forward, technology will continue to be an essential part of our lives, so in this post, I will be discussing an innovative and viable use of technology in senior care: VR and reminiscence therapy.
First, let me answer the question: what is reminiscence therapy? As the name sounds, reminiscence therapy involves sharing past activities, events, and experiences, usually with other people and the help of one’s senses. For example, aural can involve listening to past favorite music, smell and taste can involve baking a childhood favorite cake, visual can involve looking at photographs, and tactile can involve painting or sewing. An important aspect of reminiscence therapy to keep in mind is that it’s different from remembering: for example, instead of asking questions as if trying to test memories, like “where did you grow up?”, reminiscing more involves sharing memories together, perhaps looking at a photo of a birthday party and recounting stories about it. Reminiscence therapy is often used for seniors with dementia, and because its implementations can vary greatly, not much definitive scientific conclusions have been drawn about it. Nevertheless, reminiscence therapy may have positive benefits on cognition, mood, and communication for those with dementia. Now, how can virtual reality be applied to reminiscence therapy? VR is particularly useful for visual techniques in reminiscence therapy. Take Inspīr senior living’s experience with VR as an example. As explained by chief clinical officer Brian Geyser, a resident with dementia at Inspīr from Sweden had a hard time communicating with others, so they decided to try using VR reminiscence therapy with her. Set up with the VR headgear, projections of the resident’s hometown and university where she taught at were displayed using Google Earth. Suddenly, the resident became attentive and excited, pointing out places in her native language to everyone around her. VR has the potential to elevate reminiscence therapy. It takes a photograph and makes it alive through immersing the patient directly into it. Furthermore, VR can take a person anywhere: from their university in Sweden to the living room they lived in their whole youth, or perhaps on a hot air balloon above Cappadocia! Such projections involve more than just one sense, combining multiple to create a captivating and more powerful experience. And as VR becomes less costly and more common in everyday life, the possibility of its application in senior care becomes a reality. Here are a couple companies with VR headsets dedicated for seniors: MyndVR Virtue Health The Wayback
0 Comments
What is music therapy?
Music therapy can involve a variety of different activities, like listening to music, creating music, and reflecting on music. This can help in physical rehabilitation, increasing motivation for treatment, providing emotional support, and expressing oneself. A certified music therapist assesses an individual’s needs and decides what type of music and activity is most beneficial. Who can benefit from music therapy? Music therapy can be used to help people suffering from anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, insomnia, and trauma. It can also help people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and brain damage. Music is particularly effective in helping people because of its ability to activate the whole brain, as mentioned in this blog post, affecting a person’s cognitive, emotional, and physical functions and abilities. If you’re familiar with my blog, then you know that I am a supporter of music as a way to help people with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia. Music therapy can help both caregivers and patients by connecting them back to shared experiences, providing meaningful time spent together, being a relaxing experience, and uniting through nonverbal communication. I’d like to share a couple inspiring quotes I found on the American Music Therapy Association’s website, about how music therapy has impacted people’s lives: “The wife of a man with severe dementia said, ‘When I was encouraged by a music therapist to sing to my husband who had been lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease for so many years, he looked at me and seemed to recognize me. On the last day of his life, he opened his eyes and looked into mine when I sang his favorite hymn. I’ll always treasure that last moment we shared together. Music therapy gave me that memory, the gift I will never forget.’” “A gentleman in the early stages of progressive dementia improvised on a xylophone during a music therapy session to express his feelings, and then stated: ‘I don’t know how anyone can live without music.’” “When a couple danced together for the first time after five years of the husband’s deterioration from probable Alzheimer’s disease, the wife said: ‘Thank you for helping us dance. It’s the first time in three years that my husband held me in his arms.’ Tearfully, she said that she had missed him just holding her and that music therapy had made that possible.” From just a few sentences, it’s evident that music therapy has profound effects on both patients and loved ones. Once again, I am amazed at how much is able to help so many people and impact them in ways that traditional methods of care may not. Especially for those with Alzheimer’s, I think music is a path worth going down to evoke memories and emotions. It's almost been a month since I've been mostly staying at home, and it's become the new normal. I decided to take a break from posting about current events, and instead, I'm going to write about something I've always been interested in: the different types of memories we have.
Memory is so valuable to us because it gives us our identity. Our past forms us: even the worst parts that we would rather forget have contributed to who we are today. For this post’s topic, I decided to focus on the types of memories, which, at least to me, has surprisingly many different layers. Memory: “the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information”. The first thing that comes to my mind is a little area in the brain where all memories are stored, kind of like a storage closet. To some extent, this isn’t terribly off target, but there are actually a few different types of memories, and they involve different parts of the brain. Sensory memory: This is basically what our senses take in from the outside world. It occurs for a very brief period and allows us to retain what we heard, saw, etc, after the stimuli has disappeared. Short term memory: As the name basically describes, short term memory deals with information stored for a short amount of time, around 30 seconds, before we forget it. We can usually hold 7 pieces of information in our short term memory. Working memory: This is a newer, modified concept regarding short term memory. It’s more complex, but here is a brief summary: working memory involves processing short term memories by relating them to previous memories, like a continuous loop. Most of this action occurs in the prefrontal cortex. Long term memory: In long term memory, memories can be stored from a few hours to lifetime. Memories from short term memory become long term through encoding and consolidation. To convert memories to long term, we can rehearse the information (ex by repeating a phone number over and over), or in general, memories with significant meaning (ex emotionally) are more memorable. Every type of memory mentioned below is a type of long term memory. Explicit memory: This includes facts, concepts, events, and anything we have to actively think about to remember. The hippocampus, neo-cortex, and amygdala are involved in explicit memory. Semantic memory: This is a type of explicit memory solely involving general facts and information. Episodic memory: This is a type of explicit memory involving experiences in life. This includes the sensations and emotions involved with the event, and the basic who, what, when, where. Autobiographical memory: Again, as the name says, this type of memory refers to personal experiences and knowledge of an individual’s life. It can be viewed as a subset of episodic memory. Flashbulb memory: This is a specific type of autobiographical memory and is a highly vivid snapshot of a significantly emotional moment. This can be a happy moment, like a wedding, or a traumatic one, like during the 9/11 attacks. Implicit memory: This memory uses past experiences to remember without consciously thinking about them. The basal ganglia and cerebellum are involved in implicit memory. Procedural memory: This is a type of implicit memory, and it involves performing certain procedures. An example is riding a bike: after learning how to ride a bike, we always remember how to ride one later, without having to think about the specific mechanics of it, like balancing and controlling the bike. Priming: This is another type of implicit memory, so it also occurs unconsciously. Priming occurs when the exposure to one stimulus influences the response to another stimulus. For example, if you see food, you are likely completely S _ _ P as SOUP. In the world, priming can influence behavior and perception, both positively and negatively. Wow, that’s a lot of memory types! I also found a picture that shows some of the brain areas that are related to the different memories. Memory is definitely more of a continuous process than a simple storage area. I think what amazes me the most is how much information we are able to store in our brains; there are no limits! |
Archives
February 2021
Categories
All
|