Dr Jennifer MacRitchie and Dementia
from Dr Jennifer MacRitchie
"What changes when people living with dementia help shape the technologies designed to support them? An estimated 57 million people live with dementia worldwide - a number expected to exceed 150 million by 2050. My research explores the role music can play in supporting cognitive health and independent living with dementia.
Our team works on designing music technologies with people living with dementia. We've been working with lived experience groups to develop music devices that are engaging and approachable but aren’t infantilising or child-like. The way to interact with them is intuitive, but the music you can create is rich, sophisticated and mature. These devices are not a replacement for human interaction; they can stimulate connections with friends, family, or carers.
I've had the opportunity to engage with music all of my life and this has shaped what making music means personally to me. In designing tech, it’s easy to limit ideas of what engaging with music is. When we speak to people living with dementia, who are experts in their own experience, about what they need and would like to do, we often get much more innovative and meaningful solutions we hadn’t thought of.
It’s one thing to design a musical device but you need to understand the entire ecosystem in which it exists - how someone gets their hands on it, who supports its use, and how easy it is to use. Sheffield has a strong reputation in music psychology and inclusive approaches to music, supported by a culture of innovation that enables new technologies to be developed and applied in the real world.
We have recently launched the Bridges for Dementia Network+, a national network for technology development led from Sheffield with colleagues from Lancaster, Leicester, Portsmouth, Surrey, Cambridge, London, and Kent. The idea is not simply for academics to decide how technology should shape the future, but to incorporate lived experience into how we conceptualise and design technologies to support independent living with dementia.
There’s a lot of work needed on better understanding and supporting a full life living with dementia. We want to change perceptions of what living well with dementia means. In a community that includes a range of ethnicities, identities, and socioeconomic experiences, it is important to understand that people may have vastly different needs and requirements.
People living with dementia are on our Bridges for Dementia advisory board as well as being part of our events and proof-of-concept funding calls. One thing we hear frequently is that post-diagnosis support is inconsistent at best and absent at worst. This makes it crucial to focus our research on tools that can better support people after a diagnosis, because there is a life to be lived, and to explore how we can influence policy to enable that. The most powerful and meaningful insights come from involving people with lived experience."
