A Trip of Memory – An Innovative Cognitive Stimulation Therapy Using Good Old Times on Bus for Visually Impaired Elderly

“I still remember the times I take bus with my son and daughter to Mongkok for yumcha. Since my husband was a bus driver, we got the benefit to ride on bus for free to explore the city!” Gradma Chu said this out in a simulated bus stop booth. All these memories seems to be unremarkable, but they are the best cure to those VI elderlies with Alzheimer’s Disease.

 
Thanks to The Kowloon Motor Bus Company for donating a Caring Bus Stop Pole, and the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for offering students’ assistance, Kowloon Home for the Aged Blind created a simulated bus stop which resembled the environment of waiting and riding bus. Combining the innovative Cognitive Stimulation Therapy developed by HKSB and PolyU, the elderlies could do the assessment and treatment more effectively. 

Students from PolyU would let the elderly to tell their story about bus at the bus stop. Storyboard would come up next with the elderly to “ride the bus”. While they listened to the announcement of each bus stop, the elderly needed to press the “stop” button for “taking off the bus”. This could be used to test their reaction time and applied to the related training. As this whole process is tailored made based on the elderlies’ actual experience, they were more into the training. 

This bus stop concept helped the occupational therapist to understand better of the elderlies for their ability of logic, planning execution, language fluency, emotion recognition & short-term memory etc. They could assess the elderlies in all these aspects, evaluate the level of Alzheimer’s Disease and provide the appropriate treatment direction.

As the VI elderlies could not get benefit from the traditional cognitive stimulation therapy, we believe this meaningful story-telling therapy could link better with the elderlies, caretakers, family members and community. And it would increase the effectiveness of the treatment.