Thanks to Malou van de Noort en Noortje Broeder – 04-04-2024
Every quarter we invite one of the care partners involved in QoLEAD to share their perspectives – on AI, design or on working in academic project. This time sharing their insights: Avoord.
What does ageing well with dementia look like? Do we want to be as self-sufficient and autonomous as the situation allows? Do we mostly want company and be held in meaningful relations, perhaps? And what role do we want AI to play in upholding these values in daily life with dementia? During the QoLEAD co-creation workshop, hosted by Utrecht University on March 28th, QoLEAD’s team came together to discuss these questions that touch upon the core pillars of the project: quality of life in dementia and AI. It was a chance for QoLEAD’s researchers and care organizations to meet, get acquainted and reflect upon QoLEAD’s goals, future plans, and initial steps to the improvement of quality of life for those with dementia.
Considering how care and innovations can support ageing well is something that Noortje Broeder, one of the participants in the workshop, is quite familiar with. She works as an Implementation and Innovation advisor to one of QoLEAD’s four healthcare partners: Avoord. “It was really nice to engage with a new platform and group of people in such an interactive manner, reflecting on themes that also resonate in my work”, Noortje contends. Although she did not leave the workshop with ideas that she could immediately apply to practice, it did provide some food for thought on questions that, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, might otherwise be overlooked. Ethical questions about AI, for example. “One of the participants raised a particularly interesting issue”, Noortje recalls. “He asked: if a client needs to maintain muscle mass by eating a great deal of protein on a daily basis, then how do we feel about AI recommending to eat meat? How would AI make the trade-off between the needs of one person with the environmental costs? What, do we think, is morally responsible in such matters?”
Besides these ethical considerations, what kind of insights would Noortje, as an advisor with direct experience in care practice, emphasize as important for QoLEAD to focus on? The answer to that question is clear: keep the practical side of care, such as available resources and diverse users, in mind. “What you often see, is that the seemingly “simple” innovations are most successful. The technologies that power them can be complex, but it is important that they are user-friendly, quick to deploy, and yield rapid results. Otherwise, it is going to be difficult to implement anything among caregiving staff, people with dementia, or informal caregivers.” To make sure that healthcare staff are not left with an abundance of different “add-ons”, Noortje adds, new innovations work best if they are aligned with existing caring routines and techniques, creating a so-called “network of innovations”.
There was one interactive session during the workshop that Noortje particularly liked. During this session, participants were asked to envision QoLEAD as a successful project 10 years from now. What forms of success did they envision? “A good question, because you can almost draft a concrete program with activities on the basis of our answers”, Noortje reflects. It provided a chance for care organizations and universities to come together and collectively look ahead: what can AI mean in dementia? What is possible, desirable, what are needs, wishes and barriers? If a few insights in particular resulted from the recent co-creation workshop, it is that, as a consortium, we just started talking. In upcoming co-creation sessions, we have plenty more to discuss.
