As people live longer, the number of older adults is expected to double in the next 30 years. In Australia alone, over half of the people in aged care homes have dementia.
Dementia is a condition that affects memory and other cognitive functions, making everyday tasks challenging.
This growth in the older population puts a lot of pressure on aged care services to offer top-quality care, especially to those with dementia.
Making Voices Heard: Eye-Tracking Technology to the Rescue
Researchers are always looking for ways to make sure that older adults, including those with dementia, are comfortable and well-taken-care-of in aged care homes.
To do this, they need to know what the residents themselves think about the care they’re getting.
However, people with dementia often find it hard to answer questions about their care and quality of life using the usual paper or online surveys.
That’s why a group of smart folks at Flinders University in South Australia have come up with an innovative solution.
They’ve started using eye-tracking technology to make it easier for these seniors to share their thoughts. This tech watches where people are looking on a computer screen while they fill out a survey.
By doing so, researchers can understand which questions might be confusing or which information needs to be clearer.
Dr. Rachel Milte, a leading researcher in the study, used this eye-tracking tech on 41 older adults.
These people were living in aged care homes and had different levels of cognitive impairment—some had no signs of dementia while others had mild or moderate symptoms.
The goal was to figure out how to make surveys that these residents can easily understand and respond to.
What This Means for Families and Policymakers
The information collected from these surveys isn’t just for the researchers. It’s essential for everyone from family members to the people who make the big decisions about aged care services.
With clearer and more accurate data, everyone can understand what needs to change to improve the lives of seniors in these facilities.
Dr. Milte and her team are now planning to extend this research. They want to create questionnaires that older adults can fill out themselves, without needing a family member or friend to do it for them.
This is a big step forward because it will give a more accurate picture of how seniors view their quality of life. It will also be more cost-effective and easier to manage on a large scale.
The team is also combining the best ideas from different fields like health economics and communication studies to create these new questionnaires.
This way, they can make sure that even people with communication challenges can still share their experiences and needs.
By listening to what older adults, especially those with dementia, have to say, the aged care industry can make well-informed decisions.
These decisions could be about anything from which activities to offer to how to design living spaces in a way that makes life better for these seniors.
So, this isn’t just about a fancy new technology; it’s about making sure that every older adult, no matter their health condition, can have a say in their own care and well-being.
And when it comes down to it, that’s what quality aged care is all about.
If you care about brain health, please read studies about a key to activating ‘fountain of youth’ in brain, and how COVID-19 triggers immune response in brain.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about heartburn drugs that could increase risk of dementia, and results showing this MIND diet may protect your cognitive function, prevent dementia.
The research findings can be found in the Quality of Life Research.
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