Quality of Life and Care for People with Dementia

Dear Colleagues,

Comments from persons who themselves have dementia and live in care homes and facilities in the American South are included in our introductory discussion of what people assume about quality of life for aging persons living with dementia, and how that concept might affect their care. Unless otherwise specified, the conversations between them and university students and faculty are taken from the Carolinas Conversation Collection, held at the Medical University of South Carolina. We include them because all too often people living with dementia themselves are overlooked.

Each of our authors has been personally recruited. They come from several areas, including nursing, sociology, psychology, computer science, anthropology, gerontology, business information systems, linguistics, and librarianship. They are concerned not only with dementia care, but also with areas of care less often discussed or perhaps even bypassed in the literature. In general, they consider the following themes as initially suggested:

• Physical and empathetic acts of caregiving;
• Digital and social media including caregiver communities;
• Kinds of information and training for care that might enhance the recipient's quality of life;
• Health informatics keyed to one or more types of dementia;
• Multimodal analyses of language or physical interactions in communication;
• Different types of populations affected in various locales.

What has emerged from authors with varying backgrounds and occupations is a collage of the kinds of ways and situations and groups to which we can offer care to people living with dementia, as seen in our Table of Contents:

Prisoners; disabled patients; low-income and uninsured newcomers to the country; couples where one of them is facing cognitive decline; bilinguals who need care in each language; issues impacting the multilingual caregiver; comics and fotonovelas about dementia in a range of languages; virtual reality for teaching caregivers and ai-animated animatronic pets and dolls to support small multiethnic groups of hesitant talkers in daycare.

All of these groups need different and specialized care as demonstrated by the articles in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Boyd H. Davis
Prof. Dr. Meredith Troutman-Jordan
Prof. Dr. Dena Shenk
Guest Editors

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• dementia
• caregiving
• quality of life
• neuropsychiatric inventory
• cognitive decline
• behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia