Exploring the influence of indoor environment and spatial layout on changed behaviours of people with dementia in a nursing home

Abstract

People with dementia sometimes show changed behaviours such as agitation, hallucination, and wandering during the moderate and severe dementia stages. In addition to individual health factors, contextual factors, such as indoor environment conditions, spatial layout, and human activities, may trigger or influence these behaviours, but there is a lack of solid evidence. We used mixed methods to collect data, including the fly-on-the-wall method to observe the residents' daily lives and deploying environmental sensors to monitor the indoor environments of two central living rooms and ten bedrooms in a nursing home in the Netherlands. A data collection campaign from August to September 2022 focused on the indoor environmental parameters, ventilation control of monitored rooms, the observation of ten participants' locations, activities, clothing levels, and changed behaviours. The data were analysed using Fisher's exact tests and heatmap analysis. The results show that even though the nursing home was well maintained according to existing indoor environmental quality standards, the room conditions of temperature, TVOC, and HCHO levels and contextual factors (main activity and numbers of people in the space) were significantly correlated with locations of changed behaviours. By analysing observation data with spatial layout, participants had larger activity ranges on the days that exhibited changed behaviours than those without. Most of these behaviours were observed at the edge of common spaces, where caregivers need to pay more attention.