This project proposes a positive and playful activity for people that experience dementia, especially in the middle-late stage of the condition. What Remains? usus personal and visual informations, which stimulates an emotional and empathic involvement where pictures becomes a media that facilitates storytelling and meaningful photo association.
This product service system effectively supports non-verbal communication and can provide possibly positive behavioural changes, crossing the boundaries existing between people experiencing dementia with limithed speech abilities and those that surrounds them, such us family members, doctors and nurses.
What Remains? is a product service system (PSS) supporting nursing home staff during the intake phase of persons with dementia to provide personalized care. In What Remains? the relatives of the patients affected by all the different forms of Dementia are asked to gather autobiographical pictures of the patients and uploaded them via What Remains? App. With the app caregivers can have a clear vision trough pictures of their patients past lives, and this provides a valuable source of information that facilitate a human relationship and the enstablishment of a tylored personalize approach.
Nourcing home staff can use the What Remains? App to know their patients and add crucial informations, but also they can make use of the pictures of each patient in order to stimulate a conversation using visual communication.
The pictures from the app can be printed and inserted in specially designed transparent half-spheres. The spheres containing the pictures are used as playful triggers for the patients to communicate personal stories using visual communications. This storytelling activity help the professional carer and the patients family member to understand patients preferences in terms of food, memories, activities, emotions and thoughts.
