Take the First-Person Perspective to Become Dementia-Friendly: The Use of 360° Video for Experiencing Everyday-Life Challenges With Cognitive Decline

The current spread of dementia is engendering an emergency that is not limited to the medical issues but also involves its social dimension. Accordingly, it is necessary to promote a perspective change about the disease that supports a more inclusive view of people with dementia. To ensure this, Dementia-Friendly Communities (DFCs) have recently been developed. Nonetheless, it is not always effortless to deal with people with dementia in an inclusive way because of misconceptions about how they perceive everyday contexts and react in everyday situations. We asked 170 individuals (aged between 13 and 75) to “put themselves in the shoes of a person with dementia” for a few minutes, facilitating this through the use of a 360° video, and to try to experience how activities such as going shopping feel from the first-person perspective. Before and after the experience, participants expressed their opinions about the needs and the autonomies that are deemed to be granted to a person with dementia. The results revealed changes to social perspective after having experienced firsthand what living with dementia could be like. A deeper comprehension of what it is like to live with dementia appeared to be gained, and participants’ beliefs about the needs and daily autonomies of those with dementia were modified after the experience. It is possible to conclude that, through the change of perspective, people are more willing to be inclusive toward people with dementia, as is wished for in the DFC approach, although a wider formative intervention on how to be really inclusive still seems to be required.