11/29/2024
I'm not new to this, I'm true to this when it comes to working with seniors! As National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month comes to an end, look at what I stumbled across. It's my old research study I conducted during my senior year in college before graduation, entitled "Wandering and Behavior Management with a Patient Living with Alzheimer's/Dementia". I was fortunate to do this research at an adult day care center. I wanted to determine if behavioral modification techniques help reduce wandering and other behaviors associated with Alzheimer's disease. My study concluded that the activities I used as interventions approximately halfway through the 8-week study did not have an impact on improving my subject's Alzheimer's/Dementia behaviors she exuded, such as speaking about relatives, stating she wanted to "go home" or wandering. I focused on integrating some activities she enjoyed before her diagnosis, which included knitting, sewing, coloring pictures, and card playing. She also enjoyed singing and dancing. It's important to mention that when you work with people diagnosed with this disease, activities shouldn't be used to test a person's level of accuracy or completion. For the most part, the activity my subject enjoyed the most, stayed focused on completing her task, and did not display any behaviors was folding shirts and fabrics. Expressive art wasn't useful because my subject was verbal. Overall, there wasn't a significant change in her behaviors at the beginning of the study and at the end after the interventions using activities were introduced. I initially thought her behaviors would increase in the beginning and decrease after the intervention, but that wasn't the case.
