Multiculturalism & Alzheimer’s Disease
A concept diagram on the hierarchy of needs proposed by Abraham Maslow and Clayton Alderfer. The human figure in red represents the patients’ needs with a deficiency in satisfying self-growth, whereas the figure in orange points to the caregivers’ needs to fulfill all possible satisfaction.
The increasing number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease in North America is projected to strain the quality of care in public nursing homes. A major discussion concerns the changing demographics of patients, who are rapidly becoming multicultural, and caregivers, whom care services are demanding for diverse needs. For my master’s thesis, I studied the case to propose a new care model with a patient-centered design, an approach that promotes a mutual patient-caregiver relationship through cultural diversity and exchange. The study positions the design intervention on nonmedical treatments, adopts a theory of human motivation to human-centered design, and pilots a series of case studies on driving social and cultural innovation.