I had the opportunity to visit our customer, Northwood, located in Nova Scotia, the largest not-for-profit continuing care organization in Atlantic Canada. Northwood, which is ‘technology-forward’ is rolling Deva World out across its residential, day, and home care services.
I was welcomed by CEO Janet Simm (pictured) and Margaret Szabo, Director of Business Development. Margaret is a long time advocate of Deva World, but it was the first time she had seen it being used with her own Northwood residents.
I ran demonstration sessions with two residents, each with significant dementia. Both were captivated by Deva World, and invited me afterward to visit their room – their private space – whereupon each described to me the precious objects in their room in detail. Northwood caregivers learned about the origin of some objects in their room.
Our motto is: “we’ll help you, the caregiver, to go into your person’s world; and in their world, you will learn – and together you will have fun”.
It was fascinating to witness the Deva World effect seemingly extend into their actual lives
Margaret’s report is here:
“I had the chance to observe as Mandy did a demo of DEVA World at Ivany place with two residents. I was actually floored to see what happened and I think it was a game changer for me to understand how powerful this tool is. It was absolutely amazing to watch the reactions of first one resident and then a second. The best way that I can describe what I saw was it was like Mandy manipulated the environment through DEVA world so that she could enable them to engage and make things happen again and they did (like those videos that you see for music and memory where they wake up!). The absolute joy on their faces and the tangible excitement when they realized what they could do was astounding (even if they went round and round the rooms, they did not seem to get bored even 45 minutes in). Also, they both repeatedly kept crying out and saying how beautiful it was, which really struck me in that the screen display wasn’t, so I wonder if it was more like they were able to see something they hadn’t seen before as parts of their brain awakened? I watched as both of these residents then independently asked Mandy to visit their rooms and remained very physically close to her following the play as the effect seemed to transcend the virtual world back into their real world. This was fascinating as the subsequent behaviors and capabilities that I witnessed were very atypical of these residents given what staff told us (typically very high anxiety, very low initiative, poor memory retention, decreased affect – staff were sure that one of the residents would not be able to play, for example, but then she did with only a bit of support of her hand from me). Staff were thrilled with the outcome and immediately began planning how they could use the tool to help get these residents out of bed in the morning and engaged, which has been quite a challenge apparently. They also thought families would love it and seemed to be very comfortable with using the tool.”
