Posted in Caregiving, Research & Best Practice, The Built Environment

Using technology to support caregivers of older people with dementia

Technology can be used to support the caregivers of people living with dementia, however, developers and designers need to take caregiver needs into consideration.
Shutterstock

Janet Fast, University of Alberta

In June, the government of Canada released its long-awaited Dementia Strategy for Canada: Together We Aspire.

As a family caregiving researcher for more than two decades and a former family caregiver to my father, who had dementia, the strategy was welcome news. But my own research and personal experience suggest that we’re falling short of the aspiration to be “a Canada in which all people living with dementia and caregivers are valued and supported.”

I agree, perhaps selfishly, that research and innovation are essential for effective implementation of the dementia strategy. AGE-WELL NCE, Canada’s technology and aging network, engages older people, caregivers, product developers and designers in the development of technologies that can make their lives better.

I co-lead the AGE-WELL research project that is responsible for adding to what we already know about caregivers’ needs, developing new technologies to meet those needs and advocating for new policies and practices that will reduce the negative consequences of care. My team’s work shows clearly that caregiving takes a toll on the nearly half million Canadians caring for a family member or friend with dementia. Other caregivers also pay a price: poorer physical and mental health, social isolation and loneliness, financial hardship and insecurity. But that price is steeper when caring for someone with dementia.

Caring time and labour

Caregiving is time-consuming for all caregivers, averaging nine-and-a-half hours per week. It is more time-intensive for dementia caregivers, who provide more than 13 hours per week on average. Collectively, those half million dementia caregivers spent 342 million hours on care tasks in 2012, the equivalent of more than 171,000 full-time employees.

Care also is a different experience for men and women and these differences are more pronounced among dementia caregivers than others. Women dementia caregivers are more likely than men to experience negative health, social, employment and financial outcomes.

Layer on persistent gender wage discrimination and ineffective financial compensation strategies and it’s little wonder that a quarter of female dementia carers experienced care-related financial hardship. These caregivers often modify spending or defer savings to cover care-related expenses. This was a problem for only one in seven of their male counterparts.

Technological support

Existing technologies that can make caregivers’ jobs easier include GPS-enabled tracking and monitoring systems, smartphone and tablet applications, emergency alert systems, tele-health services, networking platforms and many others. But technology adoption and retention is poor, with 70 to 90 per cent of innovations failing.

An understanding caregivers’ needs can help technology developers in the design of apps and products that meet those needs.
Shutterstock

Sometimes this is because available technologies don’t meet caregiver needs very well. Many product designers and developers create the technology for the sake of it, without knowing whether caregivers want it or are prepared to use it. As a result, technology can have both negative and positive impacts on caregivers.

Traditional problem‐focused approaches to technology design can limit discussions to performing caregiving tasks, and fail to capture the complexity of “being in care relationships.” Product developers and designers need to understand caregivers’ complicated lives and unique needs if they’re to develop successful strategies for developing, promoting and delivering technologies to support family caregivers effectively.

Disrupting how we develop technologies by integrating caregivers into design practice so that it’s their experiences and expertise that drive the process is more likely to lead to products and services that solve their real-life problems, improve their well-being and, ultimately, succeed in the marketplace.

Supporting caregivers

While there are technologies and services that can help support caregivers, it’s usually up to caregivers to find them. Navigating a fragmented system of health and social supports is challenging, time-consuming, frustrating and often futile.

One of our team’s projects is addressing this challenge by applying a new type of artificial intelligence called cognitive computing. We have created an online tool that connects family caregivers to products that will support them and their family member or friend with dementia.

It will be far more specific and powerful than the usual search engines, allowing family carers to describe in plain language the problem they want to solve.

CARE-RATE uses cognitive computing to support caregivers looking for information and support.

A second project uses a co-creation process that taps caregivers’ experiences to develop a web portal that provides ongoing follow-up and training in the use of mobility aids such as canes, walkers, wheelchairs or scooters, when and where they need it.

A third project is asking caregivers to tell [researchers] about their preferences and priorities for technological solutions to some of their biggest challenges.

As our population grows older, disability rates increase and pressure on our health and continuing care sectors also grows. We have to understand, recognize and support family caregivers and their valuable work if we’re to meet the challenge.

Of course, technology alone is not enough to sustain the largely unpaid work of family caregivers. According to University of Birmingham social policy professor Paul Burstow, “getting the balance right between ‘tech’ and ‘touch’ is vital.”

From my perspective:

“We need to recognize the value of family caregivers’ work and their right to ‘have a life[’]; ensure that there are adequate, accessible and affordable services for care receivers and caregivers; organize workplaces and labour policy so that caregivers can keep earning a living alongside their care work as long as possible; and when caregiving still results in financial hardship for some, we need to be ready with anti-poverty measures.”

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Janet Fast, Professor and Co-Director, Research on Aging, Policies and Practice, University of Alberta

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Posted in Caregiving, International Policies, Research & Best Practice, The Built Environment

Australia’s residential aged care facilities are getting bigger and less home-like

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Residential aged care facilities should be more like a home and less like a hospital.
from shutterstock.com

Ralph Hampson, University of Melbourne

Most older people want to stay at home as long as they can. When this is no longer possible, they move into residential aged care facilities, which become their home. But Australia’s care facilities for the aged are growing in size and becoming less home-like.

In 2010–11, 54% of residential aged care facilities in major Australian cities had more than 60 places, and the size of the average facility is growing.

Today, more than 200,000 Australians live or stay in residential aged care on any given day. There are around 2,672 such facilities in Australia. This equates to an average of around 75 beds per facility.

Large institutions for people with disability and mental illness, as well as orphaned children, were once commonplace. But now – influenced by the 1960s deinstitutionalisation movement – these have been closed down and replaced with smaller community-based services. In the case of aged care, Australia has gone the opposite way.




Read more:
How our residential aged-care system doesn’t care about older people’s emotional needs


Why is smaller better?

Evidence shows that aged care residents have better well-being when given opportunities for self-determination and independence. Internationally, there has been a move towards smaller living units where the design encourages this. These facilities feel more like a home than a hospital.

The World Health Organisation has indicated that such models of care, where residents are also involved in running the facility, have advantages for older people, families, volunteers and care workers, and improve the quality of care.

In the US, the Green House Project has built more than 185 homes with around 10-12 residents in each. Studies show Green House residents’ enhanced quality of life doesn’t compromise clinical care or running costs.

Older people have a better quality of life if they can be involved in outdoor activities.
from shutterstock.com

Around 50% of residents living in aged care facilities have dementia. And research has shown that a higher quality of life for those with dementia is associated with buildings that help them engage with a variety of activities both inside and outside, are familiar, provide a variety of private and community spaces and the amenities and opportunities to take part in domestic activities.

In June 2018, an Australian study found residents with dementia in aged-care facilities that provided a home-like model of care had far better quality of life and fewer hospitalisations than those in more standard facilities. The home-like facilities had up to 15 residents.

The study also found the cost of caring for older people in the smaller facilities was no higher, and in some cases lower, than in institutionalised facilities.




Read more:
Caring for elderly Australians in a home-like setting can reduce hospital visits


There are some moves in Australia towards smaller aged care services. For example, aged care provider Wintringham has developed services with smaller facilities for older people who are homeless. Wintringham received the Building and Social Housing Foundation World Habitat Award 1997 for Wintringham Port Melbourne Hostel. Its innovative design actively worked against the institutional model.

Bigger and less home-like

Historically, nursing homes in Australia were small facilities, with around 30 beds each, often run as family businesses or provided by not-for-profit organisations. Between 2002 and 2013 the proportion of facilities with more than 60 beds doubled to 48.6%. Financial viability rather than quality of care drove the increase in size.

Today, around 45% of facilities are operated by the private for-profit sector, 40% by religious and charitable organisations, 13% by community-based organisations, 3% by state and territory governments, and less than 1% by local governments.




Read more:
It’s hard to make money in aged care, and that’s part of the problem


In 2016, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reported that residential care services run by government organisations were more likely to be in small facilities. One-fifth (22%) of places in these facilities are in services with 20 or fewer places. Almost half (49%) of privately-run residential places are found in services with more than 100 places.

All of this means that more older Australians are living out their last days in an institutional environment.

Once larger facilities become the norm, it will be difficult to undo. Capital infrastructure is built to have an average 40-year life, which will lock in the institutional model of aged care.

The built environment matters. The royal commission provides an opportunity to fundamentally critique the institutional model.

Ralph Hampson, Senior Lecturer, Health and Ageing, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Posted in Caregiving, International Policies, Research & Best Practice, The Built Environment

Empathy, a key ingredient in culture change

News Release
April 2019 | University of Pennsylvania – Empathy and cooperation go hand in hand

Taking a game theory approach to study cooperation, School of Arts and Sciences evolutionary biologists find that empathy can help cooperative behavior ‘win out’ over selfishness.

It’s a big part of what makes us human: we cooperate. But humans aren’t saints. Most of us are more likely to help someone we consider good than someone we consider a jerk.

Two figures have heated discussion as a third in the middle observes
Taking the perspective of another can help foster cooperation in a group, according to a new study by Penn evolutionary biologists.

How we form these moral assessments of others has a lot to do with cultural and social norms, as well as our capacity for empathy, the extent to which we can take on the perspective of another person.

In a new analysis, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania investigate cooperation with an evolutionary approach. Using game-theory-driven models, they show that a capacity for empathy fosters cooperation, according to senior author Joshua Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist. The models also show that the extent to which empathy promotes cooperation depends on a given society’s system for moral evaluation.

“Having not just the capacity but the willingness to take into account someone else’s perspective when forming moral judgments tends to promote cooperation,” says Plotkin.

What’s more, the group’s analysis points to a heartening conclusion. All else being equal, empathy tends to spread throughout a population under most scenarios.

“We asked, ‘can empathy evolve?’” explains Arunas Radzvilavicius, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher who works with Plotkin. “What if individuals start copying the empathetic way of observing each other’s interactions? And we saw that empathy soared through the population.”

Plotkin and Radzvilavicius coauthored the study, published today in eLife, with Alexander Stewart, an assistant professor at the University of Houston.

Plenty of scientists have probed the question of why individuals cooperate through indirect reciprocity, a scenario in which one person helps another not because of a direct quid pro quo but because they know that person to be “good.” But the Penn group gave the study a nuance that others had not explored. Whereas other studies have assumed that reputations are universally known, Plotkin, Radzvilavicius, and Stewart realized this did not realistically describe human society, where individuals may differ in their opinion of others’ reputations.

“In large, modern societies, people disagree a lot about each other’s moral reputations,” Plotkin says.

The researchers incorporated this variation in opinions into their models, which imagine someone choosing either to donate or not to donate to a second person based on that individual’s reputation. The researchers found that cooperation was less likely to be sustained when people disagree about each other’s reputations.

That’s when they decided to incorporate empathy, or theory of mind, which, in the context of the study, entails the ability to understand the perspective of another person.

Doing so allowed cooperation to win out over more selfish strategies.

“It makes a lot of sense,” Plotkin says. “If I don’t account for your point of view, there will be many occasions when I judge you harshly when I really shouldn’t because, from your perspective, you were doing the right thing.”

To further explore the impact of empathy on cooperation, the researchers looked at a variety of frameworks, or social norms, that people might use to assign a reputation to another person based on their behavior. For example, most frameworks label someone “good” if they reward a fellow “good” individual, but social norms differ in how they judge interactions with a person deemed bad. While the “stern judging” norm labels “good” anyone who punishes a bad actor, the “simple standing” norm does not require this punitive approach: A “good” person can reward a bad one.

Plotkin, Radzvilavicius, and Stewart discovered again that capacity for empathy mattered. When populations were empathetic, stern judging was the best at promoting cooperation. But when a group was less willing to take on the perspective of another, other norms maximized rates of cooperation.

This result prompted the team to ask another evolutionary question—whether empathy itself can evolve and become stable in a population. And under most scenarios, the answer was yes.

“Starting with a population where no one is empathetic, with people judging each other based on their own perspective, we saw that eventually individuals will copy the behavior of those who judge empathetically,” says Plotkin. “Empathy will spread, and cooperation can emerge.”

This was the case even when the researchers accounted for a degree of errors, noise, and misperception in their models.

The findings open up a new area of research for both evolutionary theory and empirical studies into how societies behave.

“Empathy is completely foreign to game theory,” Radzvilavicius say. “In a way this is finding a new niche for research to progress to in the future, accounting for theory of mind.”

Looking ahead, the Penn team hopes to pursue such questions, perhaps by pitting different social norms against one another and eventually by testing their ideas against observations from real people, either through experiments they design or through data collected from social media.

“It’s obvious that in social media people are acutely aware of their public persona and reputation and curate it carefully,” Plotkin says. “It would be fascinating to analyze these evolutionary dynamics as they play out in online interactions.”

The study was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundationand the U.S. Army Research Office (Grant W911NF-12-R-0012-04).

Joshua B. Plotkin is a professor in the Department of Biology in the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. He has secondary appointments in the Department of Mathematics and the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Computer and Information Science.

Arunas L. Radzvilavicius is a postdoctoral researcher in Penn’s Department of Biology.

Alexander J. Stewart is an assistant professor at the University of Houston and a former postdoctoral researcher at Penn.

Posted in Caregiving, International Campaigns, International Policies, The Built Environment

Don’t wait for a crisis – start planning your aged care now

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The earlier you start planning, the better.
Shutterstock

Alison Rahn, Western Sydney University

Most Australians prefer to die at home but few adequately plan for it. Consequently, just one in seven dies at home.

Some say they will make plans “when the need arises”. But what if you have a heart attack, go into a coma, have a stroke, or develop dementia before having shared your thoughts? We’re all ageing and none of us knows when our health will deteriorate to the point where we need daily domestic or medical assistance.

In the absence of clear instructions, you may instead be admitted into a hospital or aged care facility. That’s where most Australians aged 65 and over end up dying.




Read more:
A good death: Australians need support to die at home


The earlier you start planning for your aged care, the better. To start off, think about the possible scenarios you may encounter in later life.

Consider whom you wish to maintain relationships with, including intimate partners.

Think about how you will pay for home and aged care services, and whom you might rely on to be your advocate or carer.

Communicate your decisions (verbally and in writing) in as much detail as possible to those who need to know, such as future carers and health providers. This removes much of the guesswork later.

Relying on government-funded services is risky

Government-funded home care packages are intended to keep people in their homes for as long as possible. They provide supplementary support such as cleaning or shopping services, home visits by nurses and, in some cases, equipment to help with mobility or minor home modifications.

But while demand for these services is increasing, staffing and funding levels aren’t keeping up. Older Australians wait, on average, 18-24 months to access a home care package. In the meantime, many people are forced to move into residential care.




Read more:
Explainer: what is a home care package and who is eligible?


More than 3.5 million Australians are expected to be using aged care services by 2050. This would require an additional 980,000 workers in the aged care workforce.

However, aged care providers already report a shortage of workers. In fact, the home care workforce has declined since 2012, meaning much-needed home care services are not always available.

Many older Australians want to stay in their homes for as long as possible.
Elien Dumon

It’s also important to note that Australia’s aged care system is increasingly moving to a “user pays” model, whereby aged care clients are means-tested and expected to contribute financially to their care.

So it’s unwise to assume government funding will be sufficient to pay for your aged care services.

Attitudes to residential aged care

Aged care horror stories abound in the media, especially now the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety is underway. Unfortunately, equal media coverage is not afforded to the many excellent aged care facilities in Australia.

The royal commission reported some Australians would rather die than live in residential aged care. But there is scarcely any research into public perceptions of residential aged care and whether they change over time.




Read more:
Would you like to grow old at home? Why we’re struggling to meet demand for subsidised home care


In my own research, such attitudes resulted from exposure to negative media coverage, visiting residential aged care facilities, or working in aged care. Of particular concern were issues typical of institutional living – lack of privacy, personal choice or control. This was a particular issue for partnered residents, who represent one-third of aged care residents.

However, simply making a pronouncement that you reject residential care is not sufficient to prevent it happening. Entry into residential care usually happens in response to a crisis, either because people live alone or because family carers can no longer cope. The most common trigger is dementia.

Besides residential aged care, your other options include living independently with or without voluntary family or community support, a home care package and/or self-funded care. However, every scenario requires that you prepare in advance as follows.

Maintaining social connections and learning can decrease your risk of dementia.
Val Vesa

Preparing for the end of your life

On an individual level, there are five important things you can do for yourself.

1. Adopt a healthy lifestyle

Learn about dementia, which is preventable in one-third of cases. Make lifestyle changes to reduce this and other diseases of old age. Maintaining social connections, getting regular exercise, lifelong learning, quitting smoking, losing weight, treating depression and even correcting for hearing loss all make a significant difference.




Read more:
Some brain training programs are backed by evidence. Here’s how to pick them


2. Consult a financial planner

Early in your working life, plan your retirement income to last to 90 years of age and beyond. Aim to be debt-free and factor in costs associated with home care.

Assume you’ll be one of the 62% of people over 85 who needs residential aged care in their final years and budget accordingly. For this, you will need a bond of A$300,000 to A$500,000 minimum. Except in the lowest socioeconomic groups (who are exempted from bonds), insufficient bond money means many people, especially if they’re partnered, will not be able to afford residential aged care.

3. Talk about your wishes

First consider your preferences: where you want to die, who cares for you and what provisions you are likely to need. Then make your wishes widely known, especially to anyone you’d like to have care for you.

4. Write it down

Record your wishes using formal end-of-life planning tools well before you need them. Learn about Enduring Guardianship, Enduring Power of Attorney and Advance Care Planning in your state. By recording your wishes and nominating representatives, you will be reducing the stress and uncertainty for your family and health providers.

End of life planning tools can help.
Trinity Treft

Choose representatives who will willingly act as advocates on your behalf, to ensure your wishes will be carried out. Advance care planning is especially important if you do not want medical intervention to keep you alive.

5. Choose carefully where you live

Consider the suitability of your home and suburb if walking becomes difficult and driving is no longer an option. Are you near a hospital? Can you reach it by public transport? Can you walk to the shops? Is your garden high-maintenance? Are friends and family nearby? Are there services available that could come to your home? Move before you need to.

Support (and be supported by) your community

Ageing is a whole-of-community issue – it affects us all. We cannot expect individuals to be solely responsible for their care.

In the past, caring for older people in their final years was routinely carried out by families and communities. This is still the best strategy. But it relies on communities forming volunteer groups to actively care for their older people.

To safeguard your future, support a volunteer organisation in your neighbourhood, such as Compassionate Communities (in Sydney, the Blue Mountains, and southwest Western Australia), One Good Street (in Melbourne), Good Karma Networks (in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand), or Amitayus Home Hospice (in Byron Shire, NSW).

Some of these organisations provide training for those caring for older people. Others invite neighbours to help each other by sharing their knowledge or skills with older people and their carers.




Read more:
As home care packages become big business, older people are not getting the personalised support they need


Alison Rahn, Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, University of New England; Senior Research Officer, School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Posted in Caregiving, International Campaigns, The Built Environment

The impact on Green Spaces on your Child’s Brain Health

Press Release
February 2018 | Aarhus University – Being surrounded by green space in childhood may improve mental health of adults by Peter Bondo

Being surrounded by green space in childhood may improve mental health of adults

Children who grow up with greener surroundings have up to 55% less risk of developing various mental disorders later in life. This is shown by a new study from Aarhus University, emphasizing the need for designing green and healthy cities for the future.

[Translate to English:]  Et nyt studie fra Aarhus universitet viser at børn, der vokser op med grønne omgivelser har op til 55% mindre risiko for at udvikle en psykisk lidelse senere i livet. Ifølge forskerne er integration af grønne omgivelser i byplanlægning vigtigt for at sikre grønne og sunde byer for eftertidens generationer. Modelfoto: Colourbox.dk

A new study from Aarhus University shows that children who grow up surrounded by high amounts of green space have up to 55% less risk of developing a mental disorder later in life. According to the researchers, integration of green space in urban planning is important to ensure green and healthy cities for the future generations. Model photo: Colourbox.dk.

A larger and larger share of the world’s population now lives in cities and WHO estimates that more than 450 millions of the global human population suffer from a mental disorder. A number that is expected to increase.

Now, based on satellite data from 1985 to 2013, researchers from Aarhus University have mapped the presence of green space around the childhood homes of almost one million Danes and compared this data with the risk of developing one of 16 different mental disorders later in life.

The study, which is published today in the prestigious American Journal PNAS, shows that children surrounded by the high amounts of green space in childhood have up to a 55% lower risk of developing a mental disorder – even after adjusting for other known risk factors such as socio-economic status, urbanization, and the family history of mental disorders.

The entire childhood must be green

Postdoc Kristine Engemann from Department of Bioscience and the National Centre for Register-based Research at Aarhus University, who spearheaded the study, says: “Our data is unique. We have had the opportunity to use a massive amount of data from Danish registers of, among other things, residential location and disease diagnoses and compare it with satellite images revealing the extent of green space surrounding each individual when growing up.”

Researchers know that, for example, noise, air pollution, infections and poor socio-economic conditions increase the risk of developing a mental disorder. Conversely, other studies have shown that more green space in the local area creates greater social cohesion and increases people’s physical activity level and that it can improve children’s cognitive development. These are all factors that may have an impact on people’s mental health.

“With our dataset, we show that the risk of developing a mental disorder decreases incrementally the longer you have been surrounded by green space from birth and up to the age of 10. Green space throughout childhood is therefore extremely important,” Kristine Engemann explains.

Green and healthy cities

As the researchers adjusted for other known risk factors of developing a mental disorder, they see their findings as a robust indication of a close relationship between green space, urban life, and mental disorders.

Kristine Engemann says: “There is increasing evidence that the natural environment plays a larger role for mental health than previously thought. Our study is important in giving us a better understanding of its importance across the broader population.”

This knowledge has important implications for sustainable urban planning. Not least because a larger and larger proportion of the world’s population lives in cities.

“The coupling between mental health and access to green space in your local area is something that should be considered even more in urban planning to ensure greener and healthier cities and improve mental health of urban residents in the future,” adds co-author Professor Jens-Christian Svenning from the Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University.

Further information:

Postdoc Kristine Engemann, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE) & Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, and The National Centre for Register-based Research, Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University. E-mail: engemann@bios.au.dk. Tel.: + 45 25368404.

Professor Carsten Bøcker Pedersen, The National Centre for Register-based Research, Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University. E-mail: cbp@econ.au.dk. Tel.: + 45 87165759.

Professor Jens-Christian Svenning, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE) & Section for Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University. E-mail: svenning@bios.au.dk. Tel.: 45+ 28992304.

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