technology
Virtual memories
Virtual reality helps residents
check off their bucket list.
Saviour Buhagiar interviewed
by Megan Tran
lives or to revisit a place they may have been to in their life, and
I think it’s really important from that point of view, that we give
people that sort of opportunity right throughout their lives.
How did you go about selecting residents for the bucket
list project?
S
amsung Australia has teamed up with aged care provider
Uniting to provide a bucket list program for aged care
homes across NSW and the ACT to encourage residents to
fulfil their dreams.
The pilot program aims to evaluate how technology like vi rtual
reality can reduce isolation and support social integration for
aged care residents.
Current studies are investigating the technological benefits of
virtual reality in healthcare, including for those with dementia
and in pain management.
Residents at each home will be allowed to select an activity
they have yet to achieve, with an emphasis on experiences they
did not think possible. Samsung will then source the virtual
reality content to satisfy their requests.
To find out more about the pilot, Aged Care Insite spoke with
Saviour Buhagiar, the director of residential aged and health care
at Uniting.
ACI: How did this campaign originate?
SB: The campaign is rooted in our Inspired Care program, which
is all about trying to provide residents with a sense of safety,
comfort and normality, but more importantly, moments of
meaning and purpose.
And the virtual reality partnership we have with Samsung fits
into that really well. It gives residents a chance to experience
something they may not have had a chance to experience in their
34 agedcareinsite.com.au
We had services nominate that wanted to participate. Keep
in mind, we started this program some months ago in our
Mirinjani service in Canberra, and one of our residents there
had a long-term goal to visit New York, and the staff there were
able to facilitate a police officer from New York who was visiting
Canberra to actually come and see her and spend a bit of time
with her. And she sort of developed a sense, “Well, how could I
see New York a bit differently?”
Samsung came to the party with a virtual reality session, and
from there we developed a partnership. Then we thought we’d
take it out on the road to a number of other services, and we
were able to find five or six services that were able to participate
in the program. They asked their residents if they had wishes
they wanted to satisfy, and we were able to find residents in
those services who wanted to experience this program as well.
What kinds of requests have you had from residents?
We’ve had all sorts of requests. We’ve been visiting space –
walking in space through various cities. We had a resident go
back to a suburb he lived in 40 years ago, in Vancouver. He was
able to identify streets and places where he worked.
I was with a resident who came into the session pretty cold,
didn’t really know where she wanted to go, rattled off a couple of
cities to us, got to Paris and said, “Yes, that’s where I’d like to go.
I’d like to go visit Paris.”
I think people just make some connections and they say to
themselves, “Well, let’s give that a go.” And the beauty of this
technology is that it has a whole range of experiences that
people can have, and depending on what their wishes are,
they’re able to satisfy those.