Soundscape augmentation for people with dementia requires accounting for disease-induced changes in auditory ccene analysis

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increased interest in adapting the sonic environment to support people with cognitive difficulties, such as dementia. Research shows that incorporating “pleasant” sounds into the environment positively impacts behaviour and reduces psychological symptoms of dementia. Introducing sound into the acoustic environment creates an enhanced auditory experience, an augmented soundscape, resulting in an improved interpretation of the environment. People with dementia experience changes in their perception, which includes misperceptions, misidentifications, hallucinations, delusions, and time-shifting. Sound augmentation can support a better understanding of the environment and help in navigation time during the day. Dementia is a broad name for a degenerative disease; different types of dementia result in different syndromes and diverse auditory scene analyses. Some key auditory symptoms of different variants of the disease are auditory hallucinations, auditory disorientation, increased sound sensitivity, auditory agnosia (difficulty processing auditory input), agnosia for environmental sounds, amusia (tonal deafness) and Musicophilia. These different syndromes of auditory perception need more understanding when designing a soundscape augmentation for people with dementia. This talk aims to discuss different auditory symptoms of dementia based on a literature review and introduce ways to design an augmented soundscape to foster individual auditory needs.