A CASE STUDY OF CUSTOMIZED COGNITIVE INTERVENTION FOR AN ELDERLY PERSON WITH COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT AND EARLY DEMENTIA

Abstract

Cognitive impairment of the elderly due to aging generates difficulties in daily life caused by memory loss. The purpose of this study was to analyze changes in the memorization abilities of an elderly person suffering from cognitive impairment and early dementia during a cognitive intervention, which involved recalling the contents after reading a story. The 94-year-old subject has cognitive impairment due to aging, as well as decreased vision and hearing loss. Customized cognitive intervention ended with a total of 35 sessions by saying the contents remembered after reading a storybook in words and sentences. With a view to analyzing the subject's performance ability during the intervention session, the number of total words and different words that are remembered from reading 5 paragraphs, the appearance rate of each part of speech in the number of different words, the number of synonyms, and the number of sentences from the storytelling tasks were calculated respectively. First, the number of total words, different words, synonyms, and sentences tended to increase compared to that of the baseline, but the performance of remembering was found to be greatly affected by changes in the subject's physical and mental condition. Second, as for appearance rates in different words, nouns (54.9%), verbs (32.3%), adverbs (4.7%), adjectives (4.1%), determinatives (2.5%), and pronouns (1.6%) are followed. Particularly, nouns and verbs were found to be remembered the most. The results of this study are anticipated to provide basic data for devising customized intervention programs for the elderly suffering from cognitive impairment or dementia.