ABSTRACT
ABLE Family is a co-located play platform that engages older adults and their family members in intergenerational play and creation, meeting needs during the COVID-19 crisis. Physical distancing is required to ensure the safety of older adults, though, isolation and loneliness contributes to worsening mood, physical and cognitive health. The platform is designed to provide these benefits, by attending to the distinct needs of older adults who are frail and live with dementia. It allows for easy gesture-based engagement for older adults and more sophisticated play for children who, together, draw or paint a picture. The platform encourages low intensity, short duration activity proven to enhance cognitive health in older adults with cognitive impairment and to enhance well-being and mood. ABLE Family also aims to relieve the proven strain experienced by caregivers caring for older adults across private homes, adult residences and care facilities. The platform will operate as an elevated zoom-type platform, allowing multiple players to talk and see each other in real time as they paint and draw together. The final artistic creations can be saved, downloaded and used as screensavers, digital photos or printed. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The ABLE.family project deploys disability and crip approaches and universal design, to create a platform that engages diverse older adults with dementia (OAD) and their carers in social engagement and play. Our prototyped gaming platform, created with OAD stakeholders and carers aims to decrease loneliness and despair experienced by OAD and carers during the COVID-19 pandemic, by increasing opportunities for intergenerational family engagement. Pleasurable interactions are encouraged through real-time collaborative play (e.g. art and turn based games) and real-time video-calling embedded in the platform. Our human-centered design approach works with OAD and their carer networks to design the platform interface with features that can be used to effectively collaborate, interact and produce sustainable platforms for OAD and their carer community. This project is supported generously by funding from CABHI (Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation), the Alzheimer Society of Hamilton and Halton, and MIRA (the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging);resources and spaces supporting this work are provided by Pulse Lab (funded by the Asper Foundation) and McMaster University. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.