Final Oral Dissertation Defense: PhD Candidate, Gabby Wen

 

This ethnographic dissertation explores how personalized music and virtual reality (VR), when integrated through flexible, person-centered facilitation, foster creative engagement among people living with dementia. Across eight sessions with each of four participants, this study considers how sensory-rich, culturally resonant media shape memory, interaction, and relational presence within adult day care settings.

 

This study positions personalized music and VR as complementary modalities that co-construct a multi-sensory “space of encounter.” Within this space, memory and imagination coexist, and participants assume active roles as teachers, collaborators, spiritual practitioners, or quiet co-witnesses. Personalized music functioned primarily as affective and rhythmic anchoring, evoking embodied selfhood through melody and tempo. Personalized VR extended engagement spatially, inviting orientation within immersive landscapes that scaffolded narrative, atmosphere, and sensory dwelling.

 

Using narrative writing and sensory ethnography, the analysis attends to micro-expressions, gesture, silence, posture, and relational pacing as primary forms of data. Findings indicate that creative engagement emerged through co-creation in the present: humming alongside country songs, arranging flowers, inhabiting sacred architecture, or teaching fishing techniques through digital exploration.

 

Situated within person-centered care, creative aging, and embodied selfhood scholarship, this dissertation contributes a textured account of how technology, art, and relational facilitation intersect. It argues that in dementia engagement, presence—sustained, reciprocal, and culturally attuned—may be as significant as recall, expanding prevailing understandings of meaningful interaction in later life.