Edinburgh Napier University

  Portrait is a software tool developed to help care staff get to know personal and social information about clients that live in residential care facilities. The Portrait system consists of a biography for individuals with dementia who live in a care environment. The Portrait system contains important but limited personal and social information about the people with dementia for their care staff to access. This project is a collaboration with a new project partner the Memory Box Network. While MBN has developed a reminiscence tool which might be shared with care staff, it was not specifically designed to meet the needs of care staff rather to facilitate conversations between families. Portrait is unique in terms of specifically targeting the work schedules and usability needs of care staff and would be a complimentary tool to the ‘Our Big Box’ reminiscence tool. MBN have a large community of families while Portrait currently has a network of care homes and providers. The project will exchange the knowledge of these different communities of users and work towards combing their goals into a single larger community.