Benefits of Personalised Music in Dementia - a Feasibility Study

People will be sequentially recruited to discover their favourite music playlist, monitor their emotional responses to specific songs and explore the impact of listening to the music, on their behavioural and psychological symptoms. This will be done through a one hour music listening session, to discover the top 10-20 songs they respond to. It will then be followed by multiple shorter music listening sessions, initiated by the dementia resident themselves or their carer, where they listen to their favourite songs during their day, before difficult moments of care or during visits with their families.

12 of the recruited participants, who have symptoms and signs of mild to moderate dementia will be invited to take part in this sub-study. Using an amended version of a previously employed fMRI paradigm, each study participant will be presented inside the MRI scanner with short 30 second epochs of music (identified as evoking a positive or neutral emotional response) in a block design. Each 30 second epoch of music will be followed by a 16 second period when participants will be asked to rate subjective changes in their affective state using a computerised visual analogue scale. Epochs of positive emotional stimuli will alternate with epochs of neutral emotional stimuli in a counterbalanced order of presentation in 2 runs of 10 epochs each (5 positive and 5 neutral in each run).

1000 families affected by dementia will be invited to use our WebApp to create a personalised playlist for their loved one with dementia and share their perceptions of how the music has affected the well-being of their loved one.