Neil Maiden's presentation at the Innovation, Creativity and Leadership event held at City University London on the 13th June 2011

1. Mobile Apps to Support the Care for
People with Dementia
Neil Maiden, Kos Zachos, Kristine Karlsen and
Sara Jones
Centre for Creativity
in Professional

2. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Overview
Short presentation and demo
– Creativity in care for people
with dementia
– Mobile software apps for
care staff
– The Carer app – a software
demonstration
– The next steps
Funded by EU-funded MIRROR integrated
project 257617, 2010-14

3. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Creative Thinking in Dementia Care
Drive towards individualized care
– Limited support for care staff
Three Opportunities (MacManus 2011)
– Managing challenging behavior
– Adapting to evolving understanding of resident
– Devising stimulation to residents with advanced stage
dementia
Exploiting knowledge from other domains
– Recruit knowledge into dementia care
– Parallel and other worlds techniques
– Case-based and analogical reasoning

4. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Mobile Software Apps
Care staff are mobile
– Existing desktop applications ineffective
Exploit mobile apps
resident rooms
day rooms
 Successful adoption
in pilot care home

5. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Carer Software App
1. Care staff describes 6. Care staff review
challenging situation and enact preferred
Supports creative case
problem solving about
challenging behaviour queries previous cases
2. Mobile app invokes 5. Carer service passes
Carer service Carer service cases to mobile app
queries previous cases
Repository
of good care
3. Carer service practice 4. Carer service
matches described retrieves up to three
situation to good cases matched cases
Reflect and store cases
of good case practices

6. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Supports Two Types of Matched
Challenging Behaviour
1. Most similar cases in dementia care
– Service seeks literally-similar cases
– Sharing good practices across case homes
– P-level creative problem solving (Boden 1996)
• Structurally similar cases in other domains
– Teaching, policing, [others]
– Service seeks analogical-similar cases
– Sharing good practices across domains
– Gentner’s (1983) structure-mapping theory
– S-level creative problem solving (Boden 1996)

7. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Analogically-Similar Cases
Challenging behaviour example
“A resident is refusing to move from the dining room, and
verbally abusing and striking his neighour. The care staff is
restraining the resident and calming the neighbour.”
Parse, extract and match intentional structures
neighbour other pupil
verbally verbally
abuses abuses
1. mapping
strikes strikes
resident calms pupil calms
refuses to refuses to
move from restrains move from restrains
carer teacher
dining room classroom
2. transfer

8. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Carer in Action

9. Centre for Creativity in
Professional Practice
Next Steps
Further formative evaluation
– App extension to support
analogical problem solving with
selected case
– Longer-term rollout of software
apps in selected care homes
– Investigate effect of creative
problem solving and
individualized care
Further development
– Collaborative creative problem
solving in teams
– Extend with collaborative
creativity techniques and tools