Case Study: Creative Caregiving Guide

Earthling Interactive worked with the National Center for Creative Aging to design and launch a tool to help adults with Alzheimer’s disease and related cognitive disorders experience the powerful benefits of arts, music and dance with their caregivers.

CHALLENGE

Enhance quality of life and enable healthful caregiving with arts, music and dance for adults with Alzheimer’s and the family, friends and professionals that provide their care.

The National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA) is the nation’s leading advocate for arts programs that support creative aging. NCCA identified a lack of readily accessible tools to encourage joy in the caregiving experience as one of the major challenges to taking care of aging seniors. They asked Earthling to help them vision, design and build a program that would address this need.

Working with leaders in the creative aging field, NCCA and Earthling explored building a program that would:

  • Empower caregivers to experience positive, creative caregiving that supported their need for renewal.
  • Acknowledge the complex interior emotional and intellectual landscape of adults with age-related cognitive challenges.
  • Connect artists with the caregiving community and demonstrate the importance of engaging with artists as valued professionals.

SOLUTION

The NCCA Creative Caregiving Guide ©, a free, web-based module series with instructional videos and materials guide based on a courseware plugin.

Earthling Interactive identified a plugin to support a courseware program to structure the caregiving modules. We also developed a mechanism for tracking participation to provide data for research professionals in the caregiving community. We worked closely with NCCA to modify the plugin to meet the specific goals of the program and to integrate the outstanding instructional videos produced by NCCA partner program OMA The Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University.

RESULTS

NCCA released the Creative Caregiving Guide © at the 2015 annual Arts & Wellness Symposium. The project was enthusiastically received and is already recognized as a cutting edge achievement for the caregiving community. With relatively few online resources dedicated to this population, and with even fewer free and accessible programs, the NCCA Creative Caregiving Guide © is helping to usher in a period of exciting growth in technology geared toward enhancing quality of life for seniors.