Supporting Creativity in Aged Care: Lessons from Group Singing, Music Therapy, and Immersive Virtual Reality Programs

Abstract

Engaging in creative activities can be valuable in later life, especially for those who want to enhance their social connections or who have experienced reduced opportunities to engage in meaningful activities due to health and care needs. As well as being beneficial for older adults, we argue that creativity can be an important component of psychosocial caregiving. This has implications for how we design and use technology to support care in later life. In this paper, we draw on our combined experiences with three programs of research that each focused on psychosocial caregiving in different care settings. Further, each program involved different creative endeavours, including group singing..