Abstract
Background
The Covid‐19 pandemic has created social isolation across all age groups. Literature reports that persons with dementia experience significant social isolation resulting in stress and anxiety for their caregivers as well. Interactive communication technologies like Zoom have been employed to reduce the impact of the pandemic. However, we find no reports using this technology with persons with dementia. Our study used the Zoom platform to maintain social connectivity with 16 day center clients who represent an immigrant community identified with mild to moderate cognitive impairment. We hypothesize that by using technology which allows facial recognition and communication and by focusing on the meaning of home, these persons and their carers expressed positive emotional feelings and remained engaged with their social world despite what was going on around them.
Method
Online psychodrama sessions were conducted for 7 weeks, 1 hour each week during the COVID‐19 lockdown. Carers were instructed on using the tablet and preparations needed for the Zoom session. The session was video recorded following the ethics guidelines of the day center MELABEV and manually transcribed. NVivo software was used in the qualitative analysis.
Result
Five main themes emerged from this analysis: Emotions, Home/Family, Social Connectivity, Reminiscence with Objects, and Carers Participation. Clients demonstrated significant social interaction without inhibition in their participation and displayed emotional expressions of what home means to them. In contrast to recent literature, neither clients nor their caregivers exhibited anxiety, stress, depression, or security issues despite their social isolation. Despite cognitive limitations, the clients were engaged, connected, interacted, and communicated with one another in very personal ways.
Conclusion
Results support the notion that technology like Zoom offers an option for preventing social isolation and mitigating the negative impact of supporting someone with dementia during this pandemic and other crises. From a societal perspective, particularly during COVID‐19, the importance of making available technology to persons with dementia and seeing them socially connect and engage through a medium not part of their generation has far‐reaching implications not only for future research but also for policy considerations, mitigating social isolation and caregiver burden among a vulnerable population.
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