A Tokyo-based operator of nursing care homes is promoting a project using virtual reality technology to simulate dementia experience in an effort to help boost public understand of cognitive decline.
Silver Wood Corp. has developed virtual reality videos for the project based on the experience of people with dementia and the views of care workers, and about 1,000 people have attended its events since the project was launched in March.
Tadamichi Shimogawara, the 45-year-old president of the company, said the variety of symptoms exhibited by people with dementia is not well recognized.
High-definition images with a 360-degree field of vision, combined with sound effects, help those watching the VR videos to understand specific symptoms, Shimogawara said.
In October, around 20 people including Keio University students participated in an event at a nursing care home in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, watching three of the videos.
One of the videos conveys the experience of a woman on a train struggling to remember her destination. She gets off the train with other passengers but is then at a total loss. She feels relieved when a passenger asks, "Do you need help?"
"I had thought people with dementia lack emotion. But I feel (after watching the videos) that they will be scared in such situations," a Keio University student said.
Shimogawara said, "As interpretation of the VR videos depends on the viewers, I hope they will think about how to deal with people with dementia on their own."
Experts are divided over the virtual dementia experience.
The VR videos "help us to understand what people with dementia perceive," Kenji Kosaka, a psychiatrist known for his discovery of dementia with Lewy bodies, said after watching them.
But psychiatrist Hideki Wada said the videos "hardly reproduce memory impairment, which is a symptom of dementia at an early stage, although they offer families of people with dementia an opportunity to know what assistance they require."
This article was originally published by Kyodo News. Reprinted with permission.
Editor: Olivia Yang
