Communicating with people living with dementia who are nonverbal: The creation of Adaptive Interaction.

Communicating with people living with dementia who are nonverbal: The creation of Adaptive Interaction.

Blog Article

Loss of verbal language production makes people with dementia appear unreachable.We previously presented a case study applying nonverbal communication techniques with a lady Gift Shaped Acrylic Plaque 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 T-Shirt 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.