January 2012:

Research and development in work package WP5 over the first 18 months of the project has focused on delivering creativity problem solving and reflective learning tools for the dementia care domain. Researchers have worked closely with representatives of care homes belonging to the RNHA to investigate, design, implement and evaluate creativity and learning techniques and tools adapted to the domain. In particular we have undertaken user-centred design work in the dementia care domain to understand opportunities and barriers for creative thinking in residential care homes.

Results include:

• A integrated model of creative problem solving and reflective learning with which to inform tool development;
• The adaptation of mobile micro-blogging tools such as Yammer to capture information and reflections on residents in care homes (see our blog);
• Carer - a mobile app to support creative thinking by care staff to generate resolutions to challenging behaviour by older people with dementia;
• Advanced software services that undertake computational creativity, for example to retrieve analogical cases and to generate creativity triggers from unstructured text content;
• A collaborative creativity software tool that supports creative thinking between asynchronous, distributed participants.