BU Research Blog

People with dementia often find it more difficult to understand and navigate built environments. Dementia-friendly environments compensate for impairments to maximise independence and quality of life. Within the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) a team of academics are conducting research into the design of supportive dementia-friendly environments. This research builds on over 10 years of research by Prof Jan Wiener and is currently supported by a two year ESRC grant which support a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and several PhD Students.

A key output of the research is to create empirically validated design guidelines that support effective way finding in people with Alzheimer’s Disease. These principles are widely applicable to many stakeholders including architects, building standards agencies and care commissioning bodies to ensure that they are used to develop national standards for residential care home design. Our Advisory Board who met for the first time in January 2017, is therefore formed of invited stakeholders from organisations that span these diverse disciplines: Dr Moamer Gashoot, BU; Sian Gregory, Sunrise; Alexandra Ledger, Bright Bay Design Limited; Jo Malyon, Alzheimer’s Society; Graham Parkes, Quantum Group; Stephen Pennington, QP Architecture; Lynne Petty, Sunrise; Becky Robson, Quantum Group; Sue Slater, First Port Retirement Property Services; Alice Stevens Arts Univeristy Bournemouth; and Susan Wiffen, BUPA. These invited stakeholder join internal colleagues who represent the ADRC: Dr Jan Wiener (Chair), Dr Ramona Grzeschik, Dr Michelle Heward, Christopher Hilton, Mary O’Malley, Denise Carroll and Michelle O’Brien.

The aim of our research is to help increase or preserve the independence and well-being of people with dementia, avoiding a further loss of autonomy, dignity and control that is, in theory, preventable. The Advisory Board will meet again in May and we look forward to the discussions at our next meeting!

Day of Deviance

Thoughts from the fringes and future deviations in consumer and brand research

The Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre (PCCC) hosted a one-day seminar under the theme of ‘deviance’ on 16 March 2017 at the  Hunterian Museum in London. The event involved researchers from the fields of critical marketing, consumer culture, branding, popular culture and punk. The aim was to generate discussions around discordant theories, digressive methodologies, deviant consumers and disruptive brands.

Academics invited were those who are (or have) been providing a discordant voice in the literature, or been researching in an area that could be perceived as deviant, or been exploring a sector considered as marginal, or some of their views expressed in some of their work could be considered as deviant. According to Dr Tauheed Ramjaun, lead organiser of the event: “The idea was to gather an eclectic mix of participants to stimulate debate but also to encourage a cross-fertilisation of ideas around non-mainstream perspectives”.

Participants were given the opportunity to present think pieces of five minutes about their topic of interest in an informal setting. Presentations included themes like extraterrestrial consumption, consuming the Third Reich, the voluntary consumption of physical pain, marketing and industrious modernity, the normalisation of consumer deviance, glitch as a methodological device, critique of the service-dominant logic, pursuing gay masculinities through consumption practices, the evolution of punk, etc. Our colleagues Maria Musarskaya, Chris Miles and Stuart Armon also contributed to the event.

This seminar follows the very successful Seminar by the Sea (2011) and Contemplating in the City (2014) organised previously by the PCCC. According to Dr Janice Denegri-Knott, Head of PCCC: “It was a day of thought-provoking discussion.  The productive and often dangerous quality of the ‘deviant’  was clearly evident in the think pieces that were shared on the day and the conversation they initiated.  A number of collaborations are in the pipeline as a result of this, and we look forward to our next seminar in 2019′”.

An ‘Early Reflections’ booklet for industry is currently under production as a follow-up to the event. The next event will be organised in 2019 in collaboration with another academic institution.

The Ministry of Criminal Justice in Norway have funded Bournemouth University’s Dr Sarah Hean and Finnish colleagues 300 000NOK to continue their work piloting the Change Laboratory Model of workplace development and transformation in the Norwegian prison system.  The aim of this pilot is to enhance working between mental health and prison services, particularly in the way confidential information on the mental health of offenders is shared between agencies

This funding is the first spin off project from the Horizon 2020 funded COLAB project that began in February this year in which Bournemouth University and staff (Dr Sarah Hean, Prof Jonathan Parker, Prof Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Dr Carol Bond and Dr Jaqui Hewitt Taylor) are participating.  COLAB has developed a strong international community of practice of participants from practice and academic partners in the UK, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway that is well placed to make a significant contribution to the way services work together when addressing the multiple rehabilitation needs of the offender population.

For further information on either this project or COLAB as a whole, please contact the project lead/COLAB coordinator Dr Sarah Hean (shean@bournemouth.ac.uk).

On 1st February 2017 the South Coast Network of Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) held the ‘Living with Dementia 2017’ Conference. This one day public meeting was designed to provide the public with an opportunity to hear about the latest in dementia research. Topics discussed during the day included: end of life care, dementia friendly cities, research into new treatments and how we might improve diagnosis. The event brought together researchers from across the South Coast including the Universities of Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Brighton and Sussex with interested members of the public.

Prof Jan Wiener, Dr Ben Hicks, Dr Michelle Heward and Iram Bibi represented the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) at the conference hosting a scientific cafe in the afternoon session. The scientific cafes were interactive sessions that members of the public were invited to join academics round-the-table for informal discussions about their current research projects. The ADRC projects discussed focused on the psychological and social aspects of living with dementia and included an evaluation of an acute care setting, the development of serious games and tai chi for people with dementia, dementia-friendly environments, and the use of graffiti to give people living with dementia the opportunity to express themselves.

The conference attracted over 100 members of the public many of whom were either caring for someone with dementia themselves, or working in the dementia field. This was a fantastic opportunity for ADRC to disseminate the findings of their research to the public and network with other researchers from the ARUK South Coast Network.

Last week I was lucky enough to be able to present at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport in Monaco. The conference is held every three years and the setting was very prestigious. There were over 1,200 participants there from all corners of the globe and a lot of the major figures in sports medicine and sports physiotherapy were there. On the first day I was part of a panel presenting called “Tweeting, liking, following, sharing: enhancing the protection of athletes’ health now and in the future”, for which I summarised my PhD research and expanded upon its implications. Day 2 of the conference saw myself and my co-authors present the poster shown in the photo, which relates to my work conducted in the field of disability football.

Overall it was a fantastic experience to be able to present at a conference such as this and I felt very fortunate to be able to connect with some very experienced and knowledgeable clinicians and researchers at the event. Hopefully this will lead to further research collaborations!

Our poster on concussion knowledge and opinions of medical staff working in disability football

You are cordially invited to the next Faculty of Health and Social Science (FHSS) and Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) joint seminar:

Using Technologies for Safer Walking: A Participative Inquiry

Dr Petula (Tula) Brannelly

Senior Research Fellow, University of Southampton

21st June 2017 1-1.50pm

R301, Royal London House, Lansdowne Campus

This research project examines the use of GPS and other technologies that people with dementia and their families use to help with wayfinding and location. In this presentation, discussion will focus on data from police officers involved in missing person investigations, people with dementia and their families using the technologies; and the experiences of people using the technologies gathered using an ethnographic go-along interview approach, where a researcher goes out walking with the person using the technology. Tula will draw attention to the ethics of care approach to technology use for people with dementia and their families. Project website www.southampton.ac.uk/dementia-rights 

Dr Brannelly joined the University of Southampton as a Senior Research Fellow in November 2015 to work with Ruth Bartlett on the Using GPS with Care project funded by the Alzheimer’s Society. It is an interdisciplinary participatory project centralising the experiences of people with dementia and their families. From 2006 – 2015 Tula was a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health at Massey University in New Zealand, and before that a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Tula completed her PhD, ‘Citizenship and care for people with dementia’ at Birmingham in 2004. Prior to that Tula worked in mental health nursing roles with older people.

Tula’s interest in the ethics of care has sustained relationships with colleagues from the Universities of Brighton, Professor Marian Barnes and Dr Lizzie Ward, and Birmingham, Dr Nicki Ward, resulting in an edited collection to be published in October 2015, Ethics of Care, Critical Advances in International Perspectives, Policy Press. Whilst at Massey University in New Zealand, citizenship shaped by impacts of colonisation led Tula to consider ethics of care and collective cultures and to work with Maori. Tula has researched and published with Dr Amohia Boulton to understand more about the place of care in indigenous culture. PhD supervision has included Dr Stacey Wilson (Crisis intervention, Dean’s List) and Dr Sione Vaka (Tongan constructions of mental health; Sione is the first Tongan mental health nurse with a PhD, Health Research Council funded). Tula has also researched care workers and ethics at a dementia unit, completed a qualitative study of mental health service user activist priorities for change in mental health services (in NZ and UK), and evaluated the impact of antidiscrimination training on student nurses.

In the past week I have had two publications accepted which are both linked to my research areas of social media and healthcare.

The first was the main study from my PhD which has taken 4 years to get published after being rejected by three journals! This is in the Journal of Athletic Training and summarises a feasibility study of a Facebook concussion intervention called “iCon” or interactive concussion management.

The second is in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) in their new “infographic” section and was modified from our previous BJSM editorial (Ahmed OH, Weiler R, Schneiders AG, McCrory P, Sullivan SJ. Top tips for social media use in sports and exercise medicine: doing the right thing in the digital age. Br J Sports Med 2015;49:909-910). BJSM are trying to push the publication of infographics such as this as an adjunct to traditional research papers. 

Both of these publications are timely as on Thursday I am due to present at the International Olympic Committee ~World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport in Monaco (http://www.ioc-preventionconference.org/?page_id=1188). I will be leaning heavily on both of these papers in our symposium when I discuss the use of social media to deliver healthcare interventions in sports and exercise medicine.

References:

• Ahmed OH, Schneiders AG, McCrory PR, Sullivan SJ. Sport Concussion Management Using Facebook: A Feasibility Study of an Innovative Adjunct ‘‘iCon’’. Journal of Athletic Training 2017;52(2):(in press-awaiting page numbers).
• Ahmed OH, Weiler R, Schneiders AG, McCrory PR, Sullivan SJ. Infographic: Top Social Media Tips for Sports and Exercise Medicine Practitioners. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2017;(in press).