MMM Duet System: New accessible musical technology for people living with dementia

Music offers a meaningful way for people living with dementia to interact with others and can provide health and wellbeing benefits. Enjoying shared activities helps couples affected by dementia retain a sense of couplehood and can support a spousal caregiver’s mental health. This paper describes the development of the Music Memory Makers (MMM) Duet System, a prototype that has been developed as part of a qualitative, multi-phase, iterative research study to test its feasibility for use with people living with dementia and their spousal caregivers. Through the iterative process, the diverse individual needs of the participants directly led to the adding, adjusting, or removal of features and components to better fit their needs and to make the system require as little technical experience from the users as possible for quick and easy engagement. In line with our work of developing system hardware and software to meet users’ needs, including 3D printed cases, coordination facilitation processes, a visual interface, and source separation tools to create familiar duets, participants found the duet system offered them an opportunity to enjoyably interact with one another by playing meaningful songs together.