CIRCA – a support for social interaction

CIRCA is a webpage developed to support social interaction for people who find it challenging to partake in conversational activities. Conversations and social interaction can be demanding for older adults, who for example experience memory problems, and their next of kin.

CIRCA contains a large amount of conversation stimulating materials, both pictures and music to facilitate conversation by functioning as an inspiration for conversational topics as well as a support for mutual understanding.

Increase quality of life

CIRCA is currently available for use in residential care facilities in Sweden and studies have shown that CIRCA has the potential to increase the quality of life for older adults with cognitive decline, such as a dementia disease. CIRCA contains pictures and music from various eras, and the users can access this content from a multitude of overarching themes and sub-categories.

Explore together

CIRCA is easy to use on for example a tablet computer. Each time that you use CIRCA, you are presented with three randomly selected themes (such as Childhood, Sports and Recreation) to explore together. After deciding on a theme, and a sub-category of your choice, a number of pictures or music items will be randomly selected for you and your conversational partner to browse. 


The idea for CIRCA is to stimulate conversation and help creating an enjoyable time together. CIRCA had been developed together with Centre for dementia research, CEDER (link to LiU-page).

 

Contact

The research group 

Publications

2023

Olof Sandgren, Christina Samuelsson, Emma Fredriksson, Ebba Järnvall, Anna Ekström (2023) Employment and Work Task Characteristics of 111 Swedish School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, Vol. 8, p. 782-792 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Elias Ingebrand, Christina Samuelsson, Lars-Christer Hydén (2023) Supporting people living with dementia in novel joint activities: Managing tablet computers Journal of Aging Studies, Vol. 65, Article 101116 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Inga-Lena Johansson, Christina Samuelsson, Nicole Müller (2023) Consonant articulation acoustics and intelligibility in Swedish speakers with Parkinson's disease: a pilot study Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, Vol. 37, p. 845-865 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI