Wijsheidscoach

GainPlay Studio B.V.

About this app

The Wisdom Coach is a project about slow questions. These are questions that are not always easy to answer. The Wisdom Coach invites you to take the time to look back on your life. There is wisdom and power in this reflection.

Everybody dies. That much is certain. However, the conditions in which people die have changed over the past fifty years. For example, due to population growth and aging, twice as many people die each year (135,000 annually). The dying process takes longer and people need the support of many different caregivers during their dying process more than before, in addition to the help and support of their loved ones. As a result, professional care providers in palliative care more often have to deal with the appeal that dying people and their loved ones place on them.
Little is known about how palliative care, and in particular the spiritual component, can be shaped by care providers, people at the end of their lives and their loved ones. These are existential questions such as “Has my life had any meaning?”, “Will the coming period be painful?”, or “How can I resolve the quarrel with my brother before I die?”. Topics of conversation that people engage in less and less often on their own due to secularization and depillarization, as a result of which the role for the care provider in opening up and maintaining such a conversation is increasing. Care providers confess that they provide this existential care mainly on the basis of intuition, which contrasts with the protocol-based approach in care. However, more and more attention is being paid to the importance of this existential domain, because a good conversation about death makes an important contribution to the quality of life and death. People can better shape and substantiate decisions about their end of life if they have thought about existential questions.

In the time of the COVID pandemic, changed circumstances today (remote, less time available) require a medium other than face-to-face contact to conduct this conversation. A digital conversation tool in which images play a major role could fill this gap. Moreover, technology is customizable. Designing for the last phase of life is complex. Firstly, because little is known about how exactly people at the end of their lives, their loved ones and caregivers deal with these existential questions. Secondly, for many people talking about the end of life turns out to be difficult.

The central question we asked ourselves was “Can we develop an intervention that provides easy access to slow questions?” An intervention that supports a conversation about the end of life between people with a concrete perspective on their own death and their immediate social environment. With the aim of making it easier to decide what fits best in the given situation?
GainPlay Studio has done this together with content experts from Stichting STEM, Avans Hogeschool and Hogeschool Utrecht, design professionals from the HKU, and the networkers from UCREATE. Our first prototype is a tentative exploration to flesh out an extremely delicate subject that deserves more attention than it gets today. This makes the Wisdom Coach a project that is only in its infancy.