“She’s more engaged when using the technology, she’s laughing, giving high fives, which isn’t something she’d do if she was just on the unit.”

“When we talk about cognitive stimulation… it’s getting the mind thinking, being able to reminisce over past experiences, lived experiences, focusing on the here and now.”

“Quizzes work well with them, it’s just to activate the mind to some extent and provide meaningful engagement. At the same time, we’re offering more social interaction amongst their peers, trying to get them to talk about their likes, dislikes, and have those meaningful conversations.”

“We use it to help them carry out executive functions with movement too. We use passive range of movement for some of those patients that aren’t able to move their limbs as such, and we do active range of movement for patients that are able to lets say, grasps a brush and paint an image.”

“For families, it shows them we are engaging in activities that are going to stimulate patient’s minds and we have the resources available to do that… We try and incorporate all these different elements to show families and commissioners who fund their placements here that we we’re making our best efforts to support them, to not deteriorate but to maintain those things like thinking skills, problem solving and executive function.”

Martyna and Faisal told us that although they aren’t using any specific metrics to measure outcomes, they’d made some lovely observations of patients using the interactive projector.

“There’s always been signs of happiness, signs of contentment, smiling. You get patients saying “ah” or “wow”, most of them are of the generation before the 21^st century and they’re stimulated by the technology, they relate the projector to something from the movies back in the day, so it’s reminiscing about how things have changed.”

When asked about patients who have had an especially positive response, Martyna told us about one man who paces.

“He was actually quite settled. He sat down and was immersed in the technology, the different colours. Eventually he did get up and look around the room but I think it was quite positive because he was just constantly pacing, but he’s able to sit with the projector for up to 60 minutes at times.”

And another story about a patient who presents with challenging behaviours at times.

“One lady with Huntington’s is very apathetic at the moment and can be hostile and sometimes challenging to engage with. Once she’s with the projector, she’s in there for up to 2 hours. We’d ask her ‘Oh do you want to go back to the the unit?’ and she says ‘No, I want to stay here.’ So she’s getting something other than just sitting in her bedroom, depressed actually. So she really enjoys that and she asks to use it when she’s feeling a bit lower. She’s more engaged when using the technology, she’s laughing, giving high fives, which isn’t something she’d do if she was just on the unit.”

A few favourite games in a group setting include horse racing and our new Olympics games, and for one-to-one care Holi colours and the painting.

“We have one patient who has a brain injury, but he’s quite knowledgeable about countries, so he’ll paint the flags and then talk about the country if he’s been there or not. He can name pretty much any capital of any city, so it stimulates that conversation with him. He’d sit for up to 60 minutes.”

“Some patients with slightly more challenging behaviours, they were smiling, laughing, engaging really positively with staff, which is something they don’t tend to do on the unit.”

“We’ve also incorporated some of the staff that patients see day in day out into the Happiness Programme sessions, so they’re able to associate that feeling of happiness in the moment using the projector with the staff around them to allow them to feel connected.”

“The previously lady we spoke about, she does it with our OT technician and every time she sees him, she recognises that he’s going to take her to that rom. Like she associates the person with the technology and she knows that will calm her.”

“You get more social interaction amongst patients, they make the odd comment here and there to each other. It’s therapeutic, them being around each other. It’s more than great, because our client group could have feelings of anxiety towards each other, resentment, things like that. So having the technology at the centre is even better, you do notice changes in mood. People are quite apathetic, and then all of a sudden they’re quite content, happy playing. Even people who are passively engaging and prefer to watch, I’ve noticed they’ll make comments abut the activity. Even if they don’t engage themselves, they make comments and watch other people and what they’re doing.”

And when asked if they’d recommend the Happiness Programme, Faisal and Martyna said 

“Yeah. Definitely. I think most care home settings would definitely benefit from it.”