I hope to create a world as seen through the eyes of an Alzheimer’s patient. In the eyes of a person with moderate Alzheimer’s disease, they tend to forget the object they are going to look for or suddenly forget their task in the process of looking for it, which in turn creates emotional and psychological problems in the form of anxiety and a sense of distrust in the world.

Therefore, through my design, I hope to present a first-hand view of a moderate Alzheimer’s patient’s condition and mimic the world as they see it in their eyes, helping the experiencers to experience the patient’s range of emotions first-hand.

Before this design, I did some research and I found that the patient’s state was associated with significant declines in overall cognition, verbal memory, language, and executive function, and these associations were amplified by increased anxiety symptoms. (Pietrzak RH, Lim YY, Neumeister A, et al, 2015). At the same time, when I researched the world as seen from the patient’s first viewpoint, Steven R. Sabat said that through his conversations with several men and women with Alzheimer’s, he demonstrates how the powerlessness, embarrassment and stigmatization patients sufferers endure leads to a loss of self-worth.  (Sabat S R, 2001).

In terms of technical realisation, I felt that I needed to make the experience immersive by allowing the experiencer to follow the rhythm of my design and the camera changes, my intention was to create the anxiety of not being able to find it within the allotted time. I achieved my visualisation by combining the first view of the patients I researched with the touch designer’s special effects to create a video. Secondly, through the feedback, I realised that the part I did before still required manually clicking in the background to switch scenes and did not connect to the other stages of the visualisation as a whole. So, I first used touch designer to create the video + audio of the effects for different scenes, and then put them into the same container to create a connection between each part. Thus achieving the effect of scene switching without manipulation.

Examples：

(From 1:42-2:23)

• Step 1: Use touch designer to create special effects for the four scenes.
• Step 2: Fitting different scenes into the same container and trying to dub them (not the final dub, I’m hoping for an eventual soundscape with male and female, young and old, multiple languages, and an increasingly aggressive soundtrack).

Reference List:

Pietrzak RH, Lim YY, Neumeister A, et al (2015). Amyloid-β, Anxiety, and Cognitive Decline in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease: A Multicenter, Prospective Cohort Study; 72(3):284–291. Available at: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.2476

Sabat S R, (2001)  The experience of Alzheimer’s disease: Life through a tangled veil[M]. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/94398763/the-experience-of-alzheimer039s-disease-life-through-a-tangled-veil-by-steven-r-sabat-0631216669-libre.pdf?1668688272=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_experience_of_Alzheimers_disease_lif.pdf&Expires=1709753257&Signature=Tpjf24b4BxYWS9zb7NbxEujSgm-rHkQmUDbewGaVB3bviIfD1XeYNHLU~JrO4CCHx1IrbJ4f9bbw7qQzdSXlyVtSrbTq9jJlKGoMYeJKIkpG2GoXZcqFA22lLXb8oRC44f~8H0ROA0VF73fgtZLWmLbXJankpIwhi0EOHhZqz7PySMfMkZQuJTEKP5qCt8ffkmkg3tUerr6xQgb8w~JAwJhyJekG9ha5N5oy34HqEKnJexMvLvmvOikLMOhpWi9fqjt-1TtENBdo3LoUwUQjAA1HDnTbkaMTqkqQspsbeH6ccDMNYACDxKIviqnsfqp3FG5KnY6zx5cSNQau9jFpww__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

 

Mar 6, 2024