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I've just spent three days with my mother. She is in a care home. She has Alzheimer's, a cat and a laptop. She's pretty sharp still but sinking. The laptop thr

I've just spent three days with my mother. She is in a care home. She has Alzheimer's, a cat and a laptop. She's pretty sharp still but sinking. The laptop throws up some warning screen on bootup about the power adapter and recommends to go into BIOS to stop the warning. I wrote out the instructions: just ignore and click continue. She's locked on that screen obsessing. Anyway she doesn't have the password, so the computer is useless. She can't stop trying though. She's shamed by not being able to use it. If she could get in then the frustrations would only increase. The cat is great though. Planning tech for Alzheimer's is like designing UI for people on acid. You have no idea how confusing things can get and how silly your interface and assumptions are.

existencebox 8y ago
My grandmother spent the last years of her life deep in the fog of Alzheimers. Unfortunately, I can't imagine any level of tech beyond the _most basic_ supervisory and assistive care would have helped in her case. (She thought, and had many violent incidents as a result of thinking, that I was her dead husband, among other things) My only silver lining is that she was too far gone to feel any of that frustration. She lived in a different world from the rest of us near the end. I say this because your last sentence stuck with me in that context. I'd say it's even harder than acid, the fundamental precepts of how your brain functions have begun to break down, and my focus, at least with preparing myself philosophically for this path and in brainstorming assistive capabilities, is on ways to integrate tech "invisibly." Even the most basic things, better monitoring for incidents, the ability to detect the need for assisted care before it became urgent, mechanisms to bridge gaps caused by the loss of individual competence without requiring new skill sets and learning. I was only a child when I was exposed to the bulk of this, so sincere apologies if any of the above seems to come from a weird point of view, I realize it can be a sensitive subject.
- crucialfelix 8y ago
  Higher doses of acid and bad trips result in intense pattern transfer. In my youth I've had the ink boil off the page as I wrote, confusion as to how many people I am, and one time I couldn't understand cause and effect for a few hours. There really is no UI for people that don't comprehend the arrow of causality. There is a woman at my mother's home. She had run a company, now she's in an advanced stage of AD. She wanted to pitch an idea to me to see if I would go into business with her. It was something that went around and around and around and it looks at you. Eventually I figured out that she had been looking at a rainbow windmill on the balcony and had transferred that into some cosmic invention. Her other idea was for a place where people could meet to work on ideas and build electronics. Especially for young women. That's a makerspace ! I found one in high Wycombe and considered contacting them to see if any women makers wanted to visit this fascinating old woman.
derefr 8y ago
I'm curious, in both of these cases—designing for use by people with Alzheimers, or for people on psychedelics—whether designs that work for these cases turn out to be better, more refined designs for the general population as well. Is it just a higher bar, or would such solutions over-fit and so work well for the one group and nobody else?
- trevyn 8y ago
  A friend once said that he tried to design UIs for people who were drunk, high, and tired, all at the same time. They were pretty awesome even when sober and well-rested.
notahacker 8y ago
Reminds me of my late grandfather, who was pretty much the poster boy for tech enthusiasts in their late 80s. His sole request for a care home when the cancer got too bad was that his room had an internet connection so he could continue exploring the world on Google Street View. Except that sadly he just couldn't actually use it any more without help and rapidly lost interest with help, and when the cognitive decline and hypercalcemia really kicked in he became convinced of and angered by the idea that Spotify was charging him £9 every time anyone asked his Google Home to play a song (in happier times he'd set the account up himself). His decline was rather more rapid than Alzheimers patients afaik, but again there was a tipping point where the only non-frustrating UI was a sufficiently large button to speak to an attentive human.
deleted 8y ago
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existencebox 8y ago

My grandmother spent the last years of her life deep in the fog of Alzheimers. Unfortunately, I can't imagine any level of tech beyond the _most basic_ supervisory and assistive care would have helped in her case. (She thought, and had many violent incidents as a result of thinking, that I was her dead husband, among other things) My only silver lining is that she was too far gone to feel any of that frustration. She lived in a different world from the rest of us near the end. I say this because your last sentence stuck with me in that context. I'd say it's even harder than acid, the fundamental precepts of how your brain functions have begun to break down, and my focus, at least with preparing myself philosophically for this path and in brainstorming assistive capabilities, is on ways to integrate tech "invisibly." Even the most basic things, better monitoring for incidents, the ability to detect the need for assisted care before it became urgent, mechanisms to bridge gaps caused by the loss of individual competence without requiring new skill sets and learning. I was only a child when I was exposed to the bulk of this, so sincere apologies if any of the above seems to come from a weird point of view, I realize it can be a sensitive subject.

crucialfelix 8y ago
Higher doses of acid and bad trips result in intense pattern transfer. In my youth I've had the ink boil off the page as I wrote, confusion as to how many people I am, and one time I couldn't understand cause and effect for a few hours. There really is no UI for people that don't comprehend the arrow of causality. There is a woman at my mother's home. She had run a company, now she's in an advanced stage of AD. She wanted to pitch an idea to me to see if I would go into business with her. It was something that went around and around and around and it looks at you. Eventually I figured out that she had been looking at a rainbow windmill on the balcony and had transferred that into some cosmic invention. Her other idea was for a place where people could meet to work on ideas and build electronics. Especially for young women. That's a makerspace ! I found one in high Wycombe and considered contacting them to see if any women makers wanted to visit this fascinating old woman.

derefr 8y ago

I'm curious, in both of these cases—designing for use by people with Alzheimers, or for people on psychedelics—whether designs that work for these cases turn out to be better, more refined designs for the general population as well. Is it just a higher bar, or would such solutions over-fit and so work well for the one group and nobody else?

trevyn 8y ago
A friend once said that he tried to design UIs for people who were drunk, high, and tired, all at the same time. They were pretty awesome even when sober and well-rested.

notahacker 8y ago

Reminds me of my late grandfather, who was pretty much the poster boy for tech enthusiasts in their late 80s. His sole request for a care home when the cancer got too bad was that his room had an internet connection so he could continue exploring the world on Google Street View. Except that sadly he just couldn't actually use it any more without help and rapidly lost interest with help, and when the cognitive decline and hypercalcemia really kicked in he became convinced of and angered by the idea that Spotify was charging him £9 every time anyone asked his Google Home to play a song (in happier times he'd set the account up himself). His decline was rather more rapid than Alzheimers patients afaik, but again there was a tipping point where the only non-frustrating UI was a sufficiently large button to speak to an attentive human.

deleted 8y ago

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