Japan is confronted with a “super-aged” society, and a serious theme that is part of this are issues related to caring for the elderly, including high turnover rates for caregivers and patient abuse. As part of this project, we held a survey of those involved with elderly care in some capacity. We discovered that many of the problems center around caregivers and family members having to deal with severely impaired elderly patients who cannot communicate. In other words, many of the issues stem from a feeling of futility due to poor communication.
For this project we developed an application that used brainwaves to determine the feelings of non-responsive, severely impaired elderly patients. The goal here was to maintain motivation levels in places where care is provided by getting caregivers to rediscover the rewards of their work and help them give better individualized care to patients.
With just a miniature electroencephalograph (EEG) sensor and tablet to measure brainwaves, caregivers could easily determine in real time what a patient was feeling on the spot, whether it be interest, affection or stress.
This in turn enabled them to immediately see a patient’s response to something they said or the care they were giving, allowing them to reaffirm that they were “reaching the patient.”