Entitled “Mind in Action,” the manual was developed within the RealWorld Dementia Training Tool project, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ program.

The project brought together students and teachers from psychosocial support technician courses. Participants included Lisbon Psychosocial Technical School, Severim Faria Secondary School in Évora, and the Salvador Seguí and Montserrat Roig Institutes in Barcelona, Spain.

With this initiative, the aim was to create a resource providing practical activities and actions that specifically help maintain cognitive abilities and promote engagement, thereby reducing the degree of decline in people with dementia, explained the project coordinator, Eduardo Rodrigues, to the Lusa news agency today.

According to the professor from the Lisbon School of Psychosocial Support, students, under teachers' guidance, developed targeted activities and exercises to help prevent or slow cognitive decline in individuals with dementia.

Experts were consulted to lend more consistency to the students' ideas, which, although promising, were initially basic activities that required technical validation.

Subsequently, the actions were tested in various contexts in Portugal and Spain.

The coordinator stated that the book addresses the specific cognitive domains affected as dementia progresses.

He added that it offers memory-stimulation exercises and actions related to perception and localisation.

One of the suggested activities, he exemplified, is an “image classification game” to “work on perception,” in which images are provided, and users must identify and classify them by category.

“There are two pieces of fruit and a key in a box, and the user has to identify which one doesn't make sense to be in the box,” he specified.

According to the coordinator, the manual will be available in digital and physical formats to interested parties through the project's website, to be launched soon.

The project involved approximately 300 students, aged 15-19, from the professional courses in psychosocial support technician training offered at the four schools.