A Vocal Assessment Method (VAM) to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Interactive Drawing Therapy for Patients with Dementia (PwD) (A Prospective Paper)

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundIt is crucial to develop non‐pharmacological interventions to help people with dementia. Among different types of non‐pharmaceutical interventions for dementia, art therapy interventions have been shown helpful for improving patients’ physiological and mental states, in particular their cognitive performances, cognitive functionalities, including emotional states, verbal fluency, and behavioral reactions. We use Interactive Drawing Therapy (IDT), proposed by Russell Withers, as an art therapeutic method for people with dementia and to explore the method’s effectiveness, we suggest developing a vocal assessment method.MethodWe will recruit participants with mild AD and individuals without dementia and divide them into two groups, an experimental group that will attend the IDT sessions and a control group that won’t be offered the IDT sessions. All participants will attend two picture description sessions while they describe the cookie theft picture or the picnic scene. For the experimental group, we will offer attending two IDT sessions between two picture description sessions. During the first IDT session, the art therapist helps participants draw their thoughts about what he is doing during the day and describe their feelings. During the second IDT session, the art therapist shows one of the pictures, “Man changing the bulb” or “The Cat in the Tree,” and asks them to describe the picture with drawing and writing words. We collect speeches of participants during picture description and IDT sessions. The cognitive status of each participant will be measured using the Mini‐mental state examination (MMSE) test.ResultWe will aim to develop a binary classifier to distinguish patients with improved verbal fluency from patients without any enhancements in verbal fluency. It can be a part of a vocal assessment method to assess improvements in verbal fluency of patients attending IDT sessions which will be designed by combing the picture description. We also expect that such IDT sessions can enhance the verbal fluency of patients with dementia.ConclusionThis study will promise to develop a vocal system to discover the effectiveness of IDT for peoplewith dementia. As a part of this study we aim to identify linguistic and acoustic features that might change during the IDT sessions.