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Abstract
The multimedia biography tells the story of the life of an elderly person with a cognitive impairment in motion picture format. The multimedia biography combines family photographs, film clips, audio narration, and music. It is intended to be screened on an ongoing basis to provide spaces for reminiscence and communication between cognitively impaired persons and their families. Using a production process in which we collaborated with family caregivers, we created 12 multimedia biographies for persons having Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. This article describes our production and screening processes. We also share lessons learned from the multimedia biography research to assist practitioners, families, or researchers who wish to use similar technologies and processes for eliciting and sharing life stories.
This work has been supported by Grant-04-1003 from the Alzheimer's Association and Intel Corporation. We are grateful to Elsa Marziali and Renee Climans, who initially created a video life history of one individual with Alzheimer's disease. Thanks to Tira Leah Cohene for her MSc research that identified procedures for developing the histories and systematic data collection. Thanks also to research assistance from Sarah Chatland, Kante Easley, Michael Massimi, Simona Mindy, Kristin Ramdeen, Alison Sellors, and Martin Yeung. Karen Louise Smith would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting her doctoral education. Most important, we would like to thank the project participants and their families.