The Portrait System for Care Staff of People with Dementia

Dementia is a growing concern worldwide, with an estimated 35.6 million people living with dementia. As the population ages, this number will soar. The care of people with dementia has recently been receiving a great deal of consideration as it has become recognised that current care solutions too often are not meeting the standard of care that most of us would want for loved ones. The Portrait system is designed to help care staff see the whole person not simply as a set of service needs, but rather as an individual. In this goal, it is a part of the welcomed trend of care-giving that seeks to move away from task-based care to person-centred care.

Portrait addresses the needs of the growing population of people in care homes. The work takes a novel approach to this area by focusing on care-givers, addressing the need to facilitate conversations between care staff and residents. For residents with communication difficulties, such as those that arise from late stage Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, it is difficult for care staff, givien their limited time and skills, to initiate conversations with such residents. The Portrait system was designed from the perspective of care staff. It provides an easy to use and quick means of getting information about the lives of residents before they entered the care home. In short, it allows care staff to know who the people are.

The Portrait system is the culmination of a research and development effort by the project researcher, Dr Gemma Webster, in which the Portrait software was created to act as a communication bridge between carers and people with dementia through the use of simple but effective 'Portraits'. To date, much research and several commercial offerings have aimed at memory books and reminiscence therapy for people with dementia. Like our Portrait software, many of these use multimedia software. While these memory tools might be shared with care staff, none were specifically designed to meet the needs of care staff. Portrait is unique in terms of specifically targeting the work schedules and usability needs of care staff.

The Portrait system consists of multimedia portraits of each care home resident presented on an easily and quickly accessible touch-screen interface. Informed by background research on what people would like care staff to know about them if they went into a care home facility, each portrait contains information about the person's family, key life events, preferences and hobbies or interests. The system has been tested with staff from two care homes and was well-received in terms of providing the care staff with quick and easy access to usable information about residents.

Early work on Portrait had impact in terms of both use at a care home, community engagement, and an award for social implications. This Telling Tales project will be used to provide greater impact. The Portrait software will be installed at additional care homes in the UK and commercial licencing will be pursued.

Dementia care, currently estimated to cost the UK £17 billion per year, is becoming increasingly important as the population ages. An important aspect of care considerations is the recognition that the current care solutions are too often not meeting the standard of care that most of us would want for loved ones. This Portrait project impacts society by being a part of the welcome trend of moving away from task-based care to person centred care. The aim is to help staff see the whole person, not just the illness.

The impact of this Telling Tales project is expected to be both wide and deep. As broad impact, Portrait can be expected to be used with large numbers of people through the commercialization made possible by Telling Tales. As a deep impact, this work can be expected to positively affect health and well-being of the individual lives of care home residents.

The will be three specific pathways to impact. The first will be through the installation of the Portrait system in six care homes in the UK. Not only are the individual residents at these homes expected to benefit, but also through the use of these care homes we can expect publicity for the Portrait project. We have had considerable interest in this project from the press since the Telling Tales announcement, and we will select care homes that are interested in working with us to get out the story about this software.

The second pathway to impact will be commercialisation of Portrait. We have already received enquires from three vendors who specialise in solutions for care homes. As Portrait serves a unique need, there is considerable interest in adoption of this technology. We have already begun negotiations with these vendors through our university research transfer office. These discussions will continue throughout the Telling Tales funding period, with the goal of a completed licencing agreement by project end.

Finally, we expect a third pathway to impact to be public engagement. We will seek opportunities to discuss Portrait with the lay public. As mentioned, we will work with our project partners to publicise this work with dementia. Also, Portrait is already included as a Case Study on the Digital Economy SiDE Hub website. As part of this Telling Tales effort, we will continue to update that Case Study as well as to update Portrait's web presence through video. In addition, an important aspect of public engagement will be public lectures by Prof Hanson and Dr Webster. For example, the University of Dundee hosts one of the longest and most successful series of public lectures in the UK and has hundreds of local people attending each event. In addition, we have strong links with our local science centre, Sensation, which hosts a large number of events for public engagement such as Café Science. Talks at public lectures such as these are anticipated. Notably, for Portrait the researcher, Dr Webster, won the 2009 British Science Festival Perspective Scheme competition for social implications of research. This competition involved engaging with the general public.