The impact of reminiscence therapy using virtual reality in residential aged care to improve quality of life.

Participants will be allocated to one of three groups. A reminiscence therapy intervention using virtual reality; an active control using a laptop computer or physical items for reminiscence; and a passive control/no treatment group. Three residential aged care sites will be used, one for each group. Participants in the virtual reality and active control groups will attend 5 sessions face to face conducted in allocated rooms for research on site at each residential aged care facility. Sessions will include, baseline, follow-up and 3 intervention sessions (over a period of 4 weeks). Participants in the passive control group will attend 2 sessions face to face, baseline and follow-up (over a period of 4 weeks). Participants in all three groups will have activity levels measured for 2 days using an activity watch, this will occur prior to baseline measures and will be repeated after follow-up. Session 1 For the virtual reality and active control groups only, the first session will include an interview to assess and identify appropriate reminiscence topics. This will include movies and television; music; holidays/travel; occupation; cultural; or gender specific themes. This will follow best practice reminiscence therapy guidelines (Westphal, A., Callega, D., LoGiudice, D., & Lautenschlager, N. 2017. Using reminiscence with people with dementia in sub-acute & acute care). For all three groups, The Apathy Evaluation Scale, Geriatric Depression Scale, Cognitive measures, The Quality of Life in Alzheimer’s Disease QOL-AD and Three-Item Loneliness scale will be completed. This session will take approximately 2 hours for the virtual reality and active control groups and 1 hour for the passive control group. Sessions 2-4 (virtual reality and active control only) Participants will have physiological measures recorded during the session with a wristband. Sessions will also be audio-taped. At the beginning of the session participants will be asked a question and requested to respond for a maximum of one minute. Participants will also be requested to read a wordless picture book for a maximum of five minutes. This will be repeated at the end of the session. The virtual reality intervention will use a virtual reality headset. The active control will use computer screens/iPads and/or physical items (eg photos, magazines). Participants will view tailored content based on information from session 1, for example, where the participants grew up, school attended, places they have travelled and other places of interest specific to the participant. The duration of the intervention will be approximately 60 minutes. This will include 10 minutes set-up time, 15 minutes for speech tasks, 20 minutes of reminiscence intervention. In the virtual reality intervention 10 minutes will be needed for assessing sickness symptoms using the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire. These sessions will be conducted by the primary investigator, a PhD candidate. Session 5 (all three groups) Baseline measures taken in the first session will be repeated. This session will take approximately 1 hour. Session 1 through to 5 will be completed within a period of approximately 10 working days. Adherence to intervention will be monitored by the primary investigator by reminding participants the day before and on the morning of sessions face to face.