According to Dementia Australia estimates for 2021, there are >470,000 Australians living with dementia. Seventy percent live in the community with 1.6 million people involved in their care. People living with dementia may develop a group of symptoms and changed behaviours that include agitation, aberrant motor behaviour, and irritability, anxiety, and depression. Current estimates are that these symptoms affect up to 90% of those living with dementia at some stage over the course of the disease progression.
Effectively managing these symptoms and behaviours in the community, residential aged care, or during transition between them is one of the greatest challenges facing family carers and professional carers. Managing severe agitation and other symptoms can override some family carers’ capacity to cope, leading to depression, burnout, and increased morbidity and mortality. Prolonged difficulties with coping may result in carers making the difficult and stressful decision to transition their loved ones into residential aged care, often leaving them with feelings of guilt, disempowerment, depression, and ongoing burden.The transition to residential aged care is also disruptive for people living with dementia, with negative impacts including losses in health, cognition, social connection, privacy, independence, and increased distress, anger, and confusion. Once people have transitioned to residential aged care, agitation and other behaviours may worsen, leading to inappropriate use of pharmacological interventions, which have negative health outcomes. Residential Aged Care staff also experience stress when trying to support new residents during transition. There is a need to build staff self-efficacy, which would in turn increase staff enthusiasm and attitude towards managing behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. This is likely to increase job satisfaction and staff retention.
Existing approaches to regulating agitation and managing behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia using music all rely on a clinician providing direct therapy services or training professional or family carers in the strategic use of music. There are many barriers to implementing music interventions in dementia care despite evidence to indicate its positive effects. Technology support offers great potential to address this challenge with the added benefit of being able to provide training and support at scale.
