Gotcha! A trial of an app‐based therapy for proper name anomia in people with dementia

Abstract

AbstractObjectivesProper name anomia is a common experience that can become amplified in patients with a diagnosis of dementia (PWD). The Gotcha! app aims to provide practice‐based therapy for PWD to relearn the names of key people in their lives. It has been developed according to the principles of errorless learning, which have previously been shown to improve the remembering the familiar people’s names and benefit the relationship between the PWD and their loved ones. (Clare et al, 1999, 2000, 2003).MethodsGotcha! is a digital confrontation naming therapy app which enables patients to train one face per day by using photos that the app represents. During the development phase we carried our qualitative research (thematic analysis) on why PWD get involved in research projects such as ours. Gotcha! therapy block lasts for six weeks and prior to the therapy patients complete a multiple baseline paradigm with eight weekly tests of free naming of the to‐be trained faces. During the therapy, a novel speech verifier is used to provide real‐time feedback (Barbera et al. 2020). Two analyses method is used to investigate the behavioural data: 1) within‐subject non‐parametric analysis using Tau‐U metric (Parker et al. 2011); 2) a parametric group analysis using an ANOVA.ResultsThe thematic analysis revealed four themes that will be discussed in more detail on the talk.In terms of the quantitative data, our results from the first 16 subjects showed: 1) Tau‐U. 73% showed a positive trend with better naming during the training phase with 5/10 reaching statistical significance. 2) ANOVA demonstrated a significant effect at the group level of training>baseline phase, F(1,9) = 6.68, p = .029.