‘Healing Spaces’ aims to change dementia care

A physical, sensory experience for older adults, caregivers

Among the bombast and cacophony of E3 2018’s West Hall last month, nestled firmly in IndieCade’s line of featured video games, sits a young woman at a table, a seemingly empty display behind her. There’s no gaming console or PC to be found and no flashy trailer playing on repeat, just a simple table with two boxes, two chairs, and a recent college graduate with an ambitious project.

Her name is Gabriela Gomes, the experience she’s brought with her to E3 is “Healing Spaces,” and it’s not like anything else at the industry’s largest trade show.

“Healing Spaces” is a “physical, sensory experience for older adults living with dementia and their caregivers” according to its website. Certainly, a far cry from things usually found in and around the E3 show floor, and Gomes herself is well aware. Even when filling out her application for Indiecade’s booth, she wasn’t sure of its placement at the show. “I just thought that it was not something normally seen on the show floor or maybe not a good fit,” Gomes explained. “So I was very surprised when we were invited to showcase, and really just grateful for the opportunity to celebrate this kind of work in such a setting.”

This project — her thesis at the University of Southern California — creates a vivid and natural Forest or Seaside scene on any surface through a smartphone app and a few clever physical items. Scented oils create the olfactory illusion of the scene on screen, while “sensory boxes” containing items normally found in that scenario produce the tactile sensation. The app adds visual and auditory involvement through the selected scene, and any room is instantly transformed into this new space.

One example is the Seaside scene, which displays a sunny beach and clear blue seawater on the screen behind Gomes. The scented oil concoction in the vial on the table smells of sunscreen while crashing waves can be heard through the iPad’s speakers. The Seaside sensory box contains shells and a kinetic sand that feels like sand but doesn’t leave anything on the user’s hands. “We wanted to make this as simple as possible,” Gomes stressed, and the demo was certainly easy to use.

The original idea for “Healing Spaces” came from a place many people know all too well: a personal connection with dementia. For Gomes, it was her grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s in her later years that inspired the research which would eventually birth this concept. “I thought it’d be nice to make something I wish I had at that time.” Back then I had no knowledge of her condition, and no idea how to interact with her.”

She began by researching the interactivity of video games and how it could merge with dementia care, eventually finding information on “multi-sensory environments” or MSEs, which piqued her interest. She took that research to the advisors at the USC School of Gerontology, who connected her to the Front Porch Center for Innovation and Well-Being, and before long she had a pilot test of eight patients trying her idea. She admits the app still needs some testing — she says they’re a few months out of the full clinical trial stage — but “so far it’s been working pretty well. The staff has been using it, and the caregivers really loved it as well.”

Gomes has been kicking around other ideas for Healing Spaces, like an online tutorial for caregivers to create their own sensory boxes or even more landscapes than the two in the demo, but as the pilot as progressed refinement is her main focus. “Seeing our current ‘Healing Spaces’ demo in action at Villa Gardens has been incredibly insightful,” she says, “and I feel there’s still a lot more to explore when it comes to different interaction and play patterns before we think about expanding content-wise.” (RTRS)

The pilot test, which kicked off at Front Porch’s Villa Gardens Retirement Community in Pasadena, has shown some results according to the personnel. Tanya Mazzolini, manager of the “Summer House” memory care unit in the facility, has seen some real growth in the patients using the program, particularly in curtailing adverse behaviors in dementia patients.