Technology to encourage meaningful activities following brain injury

Abstract

Background: Cognitive and behavioural difficulties after acquired brain injury (ABI) may lead to reduced engagement in leisure and social activities. Increasing participation is a goal of neuropsychological rehabilitation and assistive and behaviour change technology can play an important role in this. Focus groups and interviews were conductive with brain injury rehabilitation stakeholders (n = 24): people with ABI (n = 9), family members (n = 3) and care providers (n = 12) in order to understand the barriers to engaging in meaningful activities and what helps to overcome these barriers. A collaborative thematic analysis was performed by a multi-disciplinary research team using an approach based on Grounded Theory.

Results: Four central, interlinked, barriers were found: Access, Cognitive Difficulties, Anticipation (of Physical or Cognitive Difficulties) and Motivation. To overcome these barriers, participants cited themes such as External Motivation from both Other People and Technology, Maintaining Momentum and different aspects of Being Planful.

Conclusions: The results point to future directions for the purposeful development of effective assistive technology for this user group. Technology that is social, persuasive, adapts to individual needs and supports people to plan activities are likely to be particularly useful within neuropsychological rehabilitation.

Implications For Rehabilitation

• Adults with ABI and their carers describe problems accessing activities, cognitive difficulties, anticipationof physical or cognitive difficulties and low motivation as the key barriers to undertaking meaningfulactivities.

• Current solutions are external prompting, maintaining momentum and being planful.

• This detailed qualitative analysis of a diverse group of carers and service users allows insight into theassistive technologies that could aid rehabilitation.

Keywords:

• Assistive technology
• social participation
• acquired brain injury
• brain injury rehabilitation
• qualitative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.