We have demonstrated that ABBY’s ability to trigger memories in a resident can be enhanced by its ability to provide residents personalized media content (pictures, movies, audio-songs, and voices) specific and familiar to the resident. The richer the media content, the better the ‘trigger effect’.
A resident will wear on his/her apparel in some fashion, a beacon which will allow ABBY to identify the resident as one to interact with. When a resident engages in one of the tangible activities, ABBY will access the residents’ saved content and present to the resident in various ways the media content developed and/or selected specifically for the resident.
First and foremost we need information about the resident, the more the better. A resident profile is developed in collaboration with staff and family members. If a resident has lost their English(their second language), we can create a profile in their language(1st language). If a family member would like to be the voice the resident hears, we are happy to record them as well.
The following is a list of questions you may want to ask a family member, caregiver or even the resident:
If family has pictures of the resident when he/she was younger (or maybe videos that were taken a while ago) and if the family members think they would trigger positive memories, such material would build a great profile.
Pictures from when they were between the ages of 15-25 are excellent because that seems to be the time in life that they remember. Pictures of people they do not remember does not help, they would prefer to see pictures from when they were young, with family and friends. If the Pictures are printed and no digital copy of the pictures exists, they can be sent to us to be digitized. You can also scan the pictures yourself and just send us the digital copies, but please make sure the pictures are scanned in high resolution, according to the guidelines below.
As far as Videos and Music goes, we will gather as much of it as possible, but if you could help us by providing us with direct links to a source containing the videos and music the resident would like, that would be great. We suggest finding the content of YouTube and sending to us direct links to that content, for both music and videos.
So, You gather all of this information and send it to us (we recommend you do that via WeTransfer.com, it's free up to 2 GB at a time and you can send as many times as you wish), we will put everything together, upload the files into ABBY and as a final step we will assign a beacon to the resident and send it to you. ABBY is now ready for that resident.
Photos and Images ( file format/extension is .jpg or .png):
- All Images should be of good quality with minimum image resolution of 1920px by 1080px;
Audio files - music and tv shows ( file format/extension is .mp3 ):
- Audio file should be of good quality;
- File format should be MP3, or converting will be required;
- Songs should be short, no live concerts and such;
- Songs should start right away or in 2sec latest. Downloads from Youtube often have a long introduction and when converted to just audio the introduction becomes silence at the beginning/end of the song. Example: If radio knob is turned and no music is playing for 10 seconds, the resident might just skip and go to the next one and by doing so miss the good content, or they might simply walk away;
Videos ( file format/extension is .mp4 ):
- Videos should be of good quality, not blurry or too dark, etc.;
- Ideally videos should be of HD quality. If this is not possible “Standard Definition” is the minimum we should go for (which means video resolution of 480px in height at least), because videos on the AAT system are scaled to full size HD (1080px high) and don’t look good if original resolution is less than 480px;
- Audio in the Videos should be Stereo (two speakers), not Mono (one speaker);
*We recommend using WeTransfer.com for sending files to us, it's free for anything up to 2 GB and you can send as many times as you like.
If you have any questions on any part of the Resident Profile please do not hesitate to contact us at 1-800-563-7740 or by email info@ambientactivity.com. We also encourage you check our FAQ section, there is a big chance you will find the answer to your question there.