A tool to promote prolonged engagement in art therapy

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a tool that assists arts therapists working with older adults with dementia. Participation in creative activities is becoming accepted as a method for improving quality of life. This paper presents the design of a novel tool to increase the capacity of creative arts therapists to engage cognitively impaired older adults in creative activities. The tool is a creative arts touch-screen interface that presents a user with activities such as painting, drawing, or collage. It was developed with a user-centered design methodology in collaboration with a group of creative arts therapists. The tool is customizable by therapists, allowing them to design and build personalized therapeutic/goal-oriented creative activities for each client. In this paper, we evaluate the acceptability of the tool by arts therapists (our primary user group). We perform this evaluation qualitatively with a set of one-on-one interviews with arts therapists who work specifically with persons with dementia. We show how their responses during interviews support the idea of a customizable assistance tool. We evaluate the tool in simulation by showing a number of examples, and by demonstrating customizable components.