Abstract

As we get older, our senses change, including our sensitivity to temperature. People living in care homes don’t have control over their environment, and may not be able to determine or communicate if they’re uncomfortably warm or cold. Professor Charmaine Childs used thermal imaging to understand how people’s physical temperatures compared with how they felt, and whether this was affected by dementia.

Aims

My research assistant and I measured participants’ temperatures with the thermal imaging camera. We also took images of their hands on a table, and looked at their fingertips, wrists and forearms to see how they were affected by the room temperature.

We also asked the participants whether they were comfortable, or too hot or too cold by asking them to rank how they felt on a ‘thermal comfort scale’. These scales have tended to be used in healthy, young people in office environments but they aren’t typically used for older people in care homes.