Communicating with people living with dementia who are nonverbal : the creation of Adaptive Interaction
Date
01/08/2017Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Loss of verbal language production makes people with dementia appear unreachable. We previously presented a case study applying nonverbal communication techniques with a lady with dementia who could no longer speak, which we termed Adaptive Interaction. The current small-n study examines the applicability of Adaptive Interaction as a general tool for uncovering the communication repertoires of non-verbal individuals living with dementia. Communicative responses of 30 interaction sessions were coded and analysed in two conditions: Standard (Baseline) and Adaptive Interaction (Intervention). All participants retained the ability to interact plus a unique communication repertoire comprising a variety of nonverbal components, spanning eye gaze, emotion expression, and movement. In comparison to Baseline sessions, Intervention sessions were characterised by more smiling, looking at ME and imitation behaviour from the people with dementia. These findings allude to the potential of Adaptive Interaction as the basis for interacting with people living with dementia who can no longer speak.
Citation
Ellis , M & Astell , A J 2017 , ' Communicating with people living with dementia who are nonverbal : the creation of Adaptive Interaction ' , PLoS One , vol. 12 , no. 8 , e0180395 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180395
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1932-6203Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2017 Ellis, Astell. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
Data are available from figshare (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5161384).Collections
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