For the past few months, we have been creating a survey to send out to community centers in order to collect the data needed for the development of the playlist-suggestion system. We’ve been careful to come up with questions that are easy to answer and will not take too much time. We also decided to translate the survey into the other three common languages in Singapore; Mandarin, Tamil, Malay. As we wanted an authentic translation that would make sense to native speakers, we asked around the people that we knew who could help us translate the survey.
We are now moving on to the direct therapy aspect of the service. As I am joining this service this year for the first time, I attended sessions where we role-played the patients and the students during the music therapy. I understood the difficulty of interacting with dementia patients. We were told that for most of the time, the patients would look bored and we constantly need to look for ways to entertain them. Of course, there would be many other challenges when actually interacting with the patients, but now that I am aware of the things that we have to keep in mind, I hope we will soon get an opportunity to apply these skills.
As a communication officer, I have updated the portfolio according to what we are doing differently from the usual years due to COVID-19. I’d never used the “visual builder” software, but it was easier to manipulate than I thought and I’m glad that I gained a new hard skill as I am not used to digital technology in general.
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