Can media spark memories?

A technology mission to help people with dementia and their carers

In an overheated conference room at a Winchester hotel last Friday a dozen or so people gathered to discuss an important if unlikely mission - a plan to improve the lives of people with dementia and their relatives and carers. Among those assembled were academic experts on dementia, technologists from media companies, social entrepreneurs and executives from the care home industry. I was there hoping to contribute a few ideas but also get a story out of the day.

The very persuasive Michael Blakstad

We had all been brought together by one remarkable 82 year old man, the former editor of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World programme Michael Blakstad. I wrote back in March about Michael’s plan, sparked by seeing how his wife Tricia fared in a care home, to give people with dementia easy access to all sorts of media content which might stimulate both conversation and memories. He’d come up with two concepts to make this happen.

• The Walled Garden, a platform from which care home residents might select favourite music, video clips and family photos.

• The Digital Jukebox, some kind of device which would give people with cognitive or physical disabilities a simple way to access such material.

Despite having quite advanced Parkinson’s which limits his mobility and makes speech difficult, Michael is a man who pours every ounce of energy into which ever idea is on top of his agenda, Ever since we first spoke, he has been bombarding me - and I suspect dozens of others - with emails written in the small hours about the dementia media project. He persuaded us to come to Winchester and spend the day discussing how we might put his ideas into action, promising us a nice lunch for our trouble.

I arrived expecting a relaxed day where we would all agree that Michael’s project was a jolly good idea but would leave with vague promises to think further about it. Not a bit of it - the seminar, expertly moderated by broadcaster and communications guru Khalid Aziz, was tightly focused on understanding the problem and delivering answers.

First, we heard compelling evidence of what a difference rich media content could make. Arlene Astell, Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Reading, has spent more than thirty years working with people with dementia. She says too often they are written off - “they can't learn anything, it's all downhill, so why would you bring in technology because how on earth are they going to use it. But for me, there is a huge opportunity.” She showed us a photo of a collection of elderly people all looking down and asked us what we made of it. “They look depressed,” I said. Then she showed us a wider shot of the same faces, revealing that they were all looking at tablet computers, captivated by what they saw.

Professor Astell introduced us to a concept she called the reminiscence bump, a period of someone’s life from which they retained memories even when more recent events and people had been wiped from their brains. It seems it’s usually the period from the age of around 15 to 30, when so many new experiences are piling up.

Professor Sir Muir Gray, who held all sorts of senior roles in the NHS and is now an evangelist for living well as we age, encouraged us to stress the wider benefits of this project. And he had some valuable advice on selling the whole concept to the government and to potential funders: “You're doing a wellbeing service and that should be marketed that way with strong economic benefits.”

We then moved onto what you might call the practical side of the seminar, with demos from three organisations already active in this field. My Life Films showed us how they were making individual 30 minute films crafted from personal photos and archive material designed to spark memories and start conversations with relatives and carers, something which is often hard to do. They’ve also launched My Life TV, described as a dementia-friendly subscription television streaming service.

Addressing the hardware issue was a business called Kraydel Konnect with its five button remote control, designed to give easy access to media content and video calls via the screen most familiar to the majority of elderly people, the television.

But most impressive - and forgive my obvious bias - was a BBC service called RemArc, a name that may need a little work. This offers selected content from the BBC’s vast archive designed to assist in something called reminiscence therapy, described as designed '‘to assist people who have dementia to interact and converse in a natural way by stimulating their long-term memory with material from the past.”

Here’s what you get if you select the 1950s from the BBCRemArc menu

Users can choose either a decade such as the 1950s or a theme - from childhood to sport to animals - and are then served up a selection of images, audio and video clips.

Jake Berger from the BBC told us that when they tested RemArc with groups of people in care homes they had expected them to get bored after 10 minutes or so but after an hour they virtually had to prise from their hands the tablets showing them the service, so engrossed were they.

Incredibly, this service has been going since 2016 and won an innovation award from the Alzheimers Society yet I - and I suspect most of you - had never heard of it. This feels like the very essence of the Corporation’s public service purpose, and perhaps could be a partner in whatever emerges as the Blakstad project.

Finally, we discussed the challenges facing the project and what might be the way forward. First of all, none of this will work unless connectivity in care homes is improved - a decent wireless broadband network has not been seen as a priority and many homes in rural areas can offer residents only a sluggish connection or nothing at all.

Second, staff in care homes will be vital in making any digital service work but they are poorly paid, and many lack basic IT skills. Both these problems can only be addressed by regulation - if the Care Quality Commission tells homes that digital and media services for residents are going to be part of their core purpose and will be measured, then the care industry will respond.

But the key challenge is funding - who will pay for it? The economic case for installing extra equipment and giving staff training might at first not be obvious to a hard-pressed care industry - though the wider wellbeing benefits both for staff, who could learn new skills, and residents and their families should not be underestimated.

The short-term task for the group which met in Winchester is to come up with a business plan convincing enough to get funding for a pilot scheme. We’ll need plenty of support - from tech companies, from charities and philanthropists, and from the Department of Health and Social Care - if this idea is to come off the drawing board and into the care system.

Nearly a million people in the UK are afflicted with dementia, it must affect nearly every family in the land - I know it has mine. That means there must be plenty of people out there who would like to help with this mission to improve the lives of those affected by this terrible condition. If you are one of them and have ideas about how we might turn Michael Blakstad’s vision into a reality, do get in touch.