Comparison of Gaze Skills Between Expert and Novice in Elderly Care

Abstract

It is known that a person, when ignored by others, causes various negative reactions and enhances aggressive behavior and Self-destructive behavior [1,2,3]. The same goes for elderly people with dementia, therefore, depending on the care may cause fear and confusion for elderly people with dementia [4].

At the same time, care for the elderly with dementia has a great mental and physical burden on caregivers. For this reason, the turnover rate has increased and it has become difficult to provide adequate care [5,6,7,8]. For these problems, as one of the dementia care is gaining attention Humanitude [4, 10]. Humanitude consists of four skills: “see”, “touch”, “speak”, and “stand” [9,10,11]. So, our research focus on “see”, one of the basic skills. A person’s gaze is generally directed to an object of interest or attention. The gaze is extremely useful information for estimating the mind of another person [3, 12, 13]. Therefore, we let a caregiver wear the first person camera, and four types of “seeing” behavior patterns during the oral care (care receiver → caregiver, care receiver ← caregiver, mutual gaze, none) measured. We compared the differences between Humanitude experts and novice. There was a large difference in the frequency and time of mutual gaze between expert and novice caregiver for care receiver. The act of matching the sight of eyes is an act of not ignoring the other person, indicating an interest in the care receiver, and it is considered that for the care receiver, the anxiety and fear during care are reduced.