We are all looking forward to celebrating Talking Mats is 21 on the 15^th August

The morning is aimed at people who are experienced Talking Mats practitioners and will extend thinking and Talking Mats practice. There are an interesting range of parallel sessions to choose from. Each participant will get to choose three topics to attend.

• Talking Mats as a Thinking Tool
• Embedding Talking Mats in Schools
• Talking Mats in Forensic Settings
• Talking Mats in End of Life Care
• My experience of using Talking Mats as a parent
• Talking Mats and Positive behaviour Support
• Talking Mats and Supported Decision- Making
• Empowering people with Learning Disabilities to be Talking Mats Listeners and Trainers
• Talking Mats and Children’s Mental Health

The afternoon is more informal and there will be an opportunity to engage with some of our partners – see how they use Talking Mats and try things out . There will be posters on the use of Talking Mats in lots of different places and for a wide range of applications.

Plus there will be lunch, cake and a few bubbles !

Thanks to funding from NHS Forth Valley endowment committee the event is free but you do need to book your space https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/talking-mats-is-21-tickets-62362171935

You can come to the morning only, afternoon only or come for the whole day.

If you can’t come to our event watch out for out blogs and social media celebrating the reach of Talking Mats for 21 days before the 15^th of August .Please join in with your contributions using the hashtag #TMis21. For 21 days after our event we will be having a special Birthday offer! Watch this space, more to follow …….

Grateful thanks to Prof. Dr. Norina Lauer, OTH Regensburg – University of Applied Sciences, Germany for this blog.

At the conference of the German Society for Aphasia Research and Treatment (GAB) from the 1st to the 3rd of November Franziska Rau presented a poster – Let pictures talk – about her bachelor thesis on Talking Mats.

2018 TalkingMats – Germany

Speech and language therapists from German-speaking countries meet at this conference to present their latest research findings. This year’s theme was ” Aphasia Therapy Digital”.
The presented bachelor thesis about Talking Mats was performed at the HAN University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, and was written by Franziska Rau together with Karoline Bitter and Lara Stobrawe. The students asked 29 people with aphasia and 63 people without aphasia for how representative they rated the images and terms used in the Communication section of the Digital Talking Mats Health & Well-being resource. While the healthy persons judged many items as not clear enough, the people with aphasia estimated significantly more pictures and names as appropriate. For this purpose, various reasons have been discussed, such as the possibility that the persons with aphasia directly perceived the pictures and terms as aids, while healthy persons judged more critically on the basis of the task. But also problems of concentration or comprehension in people with aphasia would be causally conceivable. This should be examined in further studies.
The poster was presented as part of a poster session and was well received by the audience. Thanks to Franziska, Karoline and Lara for their great study and to Holger Grötzbach, Janine Coopmans and Xaver Koch who supported the students.

We are always happy to receive projects and posters from anyone studying how Talking Mats can be used

Talking Mats received funding from The Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland to look at how using the Digital Talking Mats can help people with long term conditions, including dementia,  to manage their health and well-being and to recognise their own strengths and abilities. We also hoped that participants would be able to have more control over their lives and have improved communication with families and professionals.

11 people living with dementia and their partners were involved in the project. Each participant had a tablet device and was given a personal digital Talking Mats licence which gave them access to 13 topics in the Talking Mats Health and Well-being resource. We visited each participant at home, taught them how to use it and asked them to complete at least 1 digital Talking Mat per week for 6 weeks on any topic they wished. The design of the digital Talking Mat allowed them to email their mats directly to us. We visited each participant a second time to discuss how easy it was to use the digital Talking Mats and their views on their completed mats. We asked those who wished to, to continue sending us completed mats beyond the initial 6 weeks and we visited them again in 6 months to discuss how they were managing.

In total we received 94 digital mats across all 13 topics from the participants living with dementia who reported that the use of the Digital Talking Mats during this project gave them a better understanding of their own individual health and social care needs.

A woman with dementia said ‘It (Health mat ) made me realise things are not so bad and made me think I will continue with my exercise classes, carry on walking, socialising and eating well’

As well as helping participants self-manage their lives, an unexpected outcome of this project was that many people found that using the Digital Talking Mats helped them see the positive things in their life and not just the negative. It also highlighted that despite having a deteriorating illness, things were not getting worse.

‘This mat (Environment) showed me how happy I am in my own home and my neighbourhood’

The following are some of the comments we received throughout the project.
• It helps me sort out my thoughts – very useful
• I get so much out of the process
• I come up with insights which might help me in the future
• I can now talk to (my wife) in a way I couldn’t before
• I’m more relaxed now
• I come up with niggly health things that my partner didn’t know
‘It made me realise things are not so bad’.

If you know of anyone living with dementia would like to obtain the Digital Talking Mats please fill in the attached Personal Digital Licence 161117 DTM personal licence form with explanation and send it to us at info@talkingmats.com

Click here for the full report of the project which also included people with stroke and learning disability

This research will explore older father carers perspectives  of caring for a son or daughter with learning disabilities. The aim of this project is to learn more about the experience of fathers who have a son or daughter with learning disabilities and how we can provide better supports and services for them in the future.

I am particularly interested in talking to fathers as mothers tend to be the focus when discussing the impact of caring on families who have a son or daughter with learning disabilities. While it is vital that we find out how to better support mothers, fathers’ role within the family and their experiences of caring are also very important. Despite this, fathers’ voices are rarely included in discussions about how service provision could be improved to meet these families’ needs.

The project focusses on older fathers (aged 60+) as I want to better understand the experiences of fathers who care for their son or daughter with learning disabilities over time. Fathers who are aged 60 and over will be able to talk about their experiences of caring at different times in their lives and how these experiences changed over time.

Fathers who participate in this project will attend an interview which lasts around one hour. I will meet fathers in their homes or at the University of Glasgow, depending on which option is more convenient for them. The interview involves discussing father’s experience of caring for their son or daughter with learning disabilities. We will discuss topics such as caring during their child’s early years, as they grew up, and more recently. We will talk about how the father’s relationship with their child and their caregiving role has changed over time, and how caring has impacted them.

If you think that you, or someone you know, would be interested in taking part in this project then please contact me at k.dunn.1@research.gla.ac.uk to find out more.

Self-management for people with long term conditions (LTC) is now a key government strategy to encourage people to take responsibility for their own health, behaviour and well-being. Talking Mats received funding from The Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland to look how using the Digital Talking Mats (DTM) can help people with LTCs to manage their health and well-being and to recognise their own strengths and abilities.

The overall aim of our project was to empower people with different long term conditions, to manage their own health and well-being. Through using Digital Talking Mats (DTM) we hoped that participants would be able to have more control over their lives and have improved communication with families and professionals.

There were a total of 28 participants in this project living with one of three different long term health conditions – stroke, dementia and learning disability. Each participant had access to a tablet device and was given a personal DTM licence which gave them access to 13 topics in the Talking Mats Health and Well-being resource. We visited each participant at home and taught them how to use it and asked them to complete and send us at least 1 digital mat per week for 6 weeks on any topic they wished. The design of the digital Talking Mat allowed them to email their mats directly to the researchers. We visited each participant a second time to discuss on how easy it was to use the digital Talking Mats and their views on their completed mats. We asked those who wished to, to continue sending us completed mats beyond the initial 6 weeks. We visited them again in 6 months to discuss how they were managing.
15 participants completed all 6 mats and 12 participants continued to complete mats over the length of the project. Participants completed 235 digital mats across all 13 topics

There were 3 particularly significant findings

1. At 18 months the participants living with dementia actually felt their well-being had improved, despite dementia being a progressive illness.
2. For the participants living with stroke the results were even more striking as 95% felt things were going well at the end of the project in comparison with 47% at the beginning.
3. At the end of the project the percentage of people with learning disability who felt things were not going well had reduced from 19% to 10%. Furthermore the percentage of people indicating that they were not sure about their views had increased from 27% to 42%. There can be a tendency for people with learning disability when using Talking Mats, to express their views at either end of the mat and to rarely use the mid- point. However being able to use the unsure mid- point is noteworthy as it indicates that the participants in the project realised that they could express their views not only as black or white but could indicate that they were unsure. This awareness opens up the potential for people to express views more thoughtfully with opportunities for further exploration.

Here are three examples of how using the DTM supported people to self-manage situations in their lives. Click on image to enlarge.

As well as helping participants self-manage their long term conditions, an unexpected outcome of this project is that many people found that using the DTM helped them see the positive things in their life and not just the negative. It also highlighted that despite having a long term condition and, for many also a deteriorating one, that things were not getting worse.

Click here for full report including 6,12 and 18 month reports to the funders  20180717 Alliance full report

Click here for the summary report 20180717 Alliance Final Short Report

Click here for a video link of 2 participants

Talking Mats in Germany is being extended by one of our trainers Professor Norina Lauer.  Here she describes two of her current interesting  projects and we look forward to reading her findings.

The German version of the Talking Mats app will now be tested in two more projects in the west of Germany. As the communication symbols were developed for English-speaking clients six German SLT students of the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen (han) in the Netherlands want to find out if the words and symbols fit to German clients and their cultural background. Because of cultural differences between Scotland and Germany it is necessary not only to adapt the language but also check the icons.

One of the projects will be conducted with children between the ages of 8 and 10 years. The children will be asked to classify the symbols from their age-group. The question will be whether the symbols and words are relevant for the situation of German children. If not, they will be asked for possible alternatives.

The other project focuses on adults. One group of people with aphasia and one group of healthy persons will be tested. Every tested person scores the 57 icons concerning their correspondence with the words written down below by using a scale from 0 to 3. In addition, possible graphic alternatives will be enquired and collected. The two groups of adults will be used to determine if there is a significant difference between the obtained results from each group.

Apart from the necessity of fulfilling the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation which has to be completed by 25th May, I have been pondering on other advantages of complying with the GDPR.

Here at Talking Mats we are all going through files, bagging up paper for shredding, deleting data files on our master computer and preparing text to send to all our customers and contacts to make sure we only hold information that is adequate and relevant.The first advantage for us is that it’s a good way to re-establish contact with people.

I’ve been given the task of going through all the research data and have ploughed through 16 drawers of research data starting in 1992!  Way back then I worked with a wonderful professor who was keen to hold onto all our raw data just in case we wanted to check or replicate anything. Its all been under lock and key but the time has come to bite the bullet and get rid of it.  I found this to be not only nostalgic but also emotional – all those fantastic participants who gave us their time and insights.

Its also been cathartic because as well as filling bags for shredding I am smashing up discs of video footage. We filmed lots of people with a range of communication difficulties using Talking Mats to compare with the same conversations without Talking Mats to analyse any differences. So… another big advantage is that I’ve destroyed all evidence of my dodgy hair cuts throughout the years!!

I counted 41 completed projects going from the very first one in 1992 which was a demographic survey of people who used AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) systems in Scotland. In 1998 the Gannochy Trust funded the original project where Talking Mats was born Gannoch Final report. We then went on to carry out a wide range of projects which include working with people with Motor Neuron Disease, Stroke, Learning Disability, Children with Additional Support Needs, people living with Dementia to name but a few. The website contains the final reports on all our projects and in looking back at them I am also very proud of the good quality research the team here at Talking Mats has carried out.

Many others are now doing projects using Talking Mats but I leave it to them to organise their own GDPR and hope they also find the process worthwhile and rewarding and not just seen as a chore to be done.

We are delighted that ‘Talking Mats in German’ is now available in the Digital version and includes the latest technical and symbol upgrades. These upgrades are also now included in the English version.

Please click on this link to find out about all the upgrades.

We are very grateful to Prof Norina Lauer for sending us this blog which explains how ‘Talking Mats in German’ has been developed.

In 2016 Prof. Dr. Norina Lauer, a German professor for speech language therapy contacted Joan Murphy from Talking Mats because she was initially interested in the digital version for goal setting with people with aphasia. We found out that it would be interesting to have a German version of the app. So we started a project for translating Talking Mats into German. Prof. Dr. Norina Lauer managed the translation process. The project was financially supported by a German health insurance “BKK Dachverband” in cooperation with the German aphasia self-help organization “Bundesverband für die Rehabilitation der Aphasiker” (www.aphasiker.de). The translations were performed in a special scientific procedure to make sure that they match the English terms.

What did we do?

Norina Lauer and her colleague Holger Grötzbach independently translated the English terms into German. Subsequently these translations were compared and the differing terms were discussed until a consensus was reached. The agreed translations were given to a professional translator who only got the German words and the corresponding pictures. She re-translated the terms into English and these re-translations were checked by Talking Mats if they were in accordance with the original English terms. For those terms that did not match, the process started again until all terms matched the original English terms (figure 1 shows the translation process). This process was performed for all topics of the app. So we have the complete Talking Mats app in German now.

Figure 1

So what’s next?

Norina Lauer completed the foundation training and the accredited training in 2017. In October 2017 she performed her first foundation training for 6 of her SLT students. One of these students will do her bachelor thesis about the German app version in 2018. Under accompanying consultation of Norina Lauer the student will perform two workshops for people with aphasia. In these workshops they will practice doing Talking Mats and afterwards evaluate the app concerning its content and practical use. For the evaluation we are planning a short questionnaire and a focus group.

It has been a delight to work with Norina and we look forward to hearing the results of her student’s project.

If you already have the Digital Talking Mats make sure you upgrade to get all the new features.  The German version with the upgraded is now available from the App store, Google Play (Free and Lite versions) or purchase the full version from our website .

We are now half way through our project, funded by The Health and Social Care ALLIANCE Scotland, whose overall aim is to empower people with a range of long term conditions, with and without additional communication difficulties, to self-manage their own health and well-being by using Digital Talking Mats.

Participants

We have carried out all the initial visits and 16 follow-up visits and participants are sending in their completed mats, choosing whichever topics they want from the digital Health and Well-being resource. At the time of writing this blog we have received 137 completed mats.

We have received very positive feedback with many examples of how people are using the Digital Talking Mats to self-manage.

Here are 3 examples:

One participant with learning disability has diabetes. Through using the Digital Talking Mats she has stopped buying takeaways every night and is now buying M&S ‘Balanced for You’ meals. This is a huge step forward for her as she refused to discuss healthier eating before.

A man with early onset dementia has identified that he used to enjoy singing and has decided for the first time in his life to join a choir. This is not something that had come up in conversation before. Despite the diagnosis of dementia he has realised that he is still keen to try new things.

 

 

The wife of a man with severe aphasia said ‘This (Leisure away) has highlighted how few things he can do away from home. We discussed this but can’t see how we can change the situation.’ However at the second visit he used the same mat and indicated that he had been thinking about his mobility and was about to start swimming and a fitness class.

We already have an increased awareness of the meaning of self-management as we observe how participants are using the Digital Talking Mats to think about their situation, state their own views and share them with carers/support workers. We are also noticing that there is a shift in some relationships as the carers/support workers realise that the person with the long term conditions can make decisions and express their own views rather than having decisions made for them.

We are very grateful to Marieke Lindenschot from the Netherlands for this great blog about finding out what activities children like and we look forward to hearing the next stage of her PhD.

For my PhD research in the Netherlands I use Talking Mats as a tool for my interviews with children. The children I interview vary in their communication abilities. Some are able to express their opinions and feelings very well, others are not able to communicate orally. As I was able to purchase the Talking Mats cards without text, I wrote down the words in Dutch in ‘children’s language’ on the cards.

Last week was an exciting week. I conducted the first pilot interviews with a boy of 12 years, a boy of 9 years and a girl of 8 years. They varied in their development. The first interview went great. The child could express which activities he liked, which he disliked and which were ‘so, so’ (in between like and dislike). With Talking Mats he could also tell me with whom he performed the activities and where. It was a fun way to get a lot of information in only 15 minutes! The child and his mother were very enthusiastic. He was able to tell a lot more then he usually does when he is asked about his activities! Unfortunately the other two interviews didn’t produce the same amount of information. The cognitive level of these children seemed too low to use Talking Mats. The boy didn’t understand the top scale ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, whereas the girl didn’t recognize the activities on the cards.
Overall we were very satisfied with these pilot interviews. The goal was to check if the interview guide with Talking Mats ‘worked’ and also to see for which developmental level this way of interviewing is possible. The pilot interviews gave a lot of information on these two goals. I am looking forward to the next interviews as Talking Mats showed to be a very helpful tool in finding out which activities children like.

Please send us any other examples of how you have used Talking Mats.