Connect care homes to battle dementia

Ex Tomorrow's World editor says digital media matters to the elderly

Tricia and Michael Blakstad celebrating their golden wedding in 2015

During the pandemic we have all come to appreciate the importance of a good broadband connection and the services it can bring. But one section of the population, elderly people in care homes, have often been deprived of connectivity - and that has caused them real harm during lockdowns when they desperately needed contact with their loved ones.

I’ve been talking to a remarkable man who has a plan to deal with this issue and also to provide elderly dementia sufferers with the kind of visual content which could help to slow the worsening of their condition. When Michael Blakstad got in touch I realised I had seen his name many times on the end credits of Tomorrow’s World.

He was for many years the editor of that much missed programme, but that was just one phase of a broadcasting career which saw him constantly battling for innovative ideas, sometimes in conflict with his more cautious bosses.

Now at 81, and like me living with Parkinson’s Disease, he has another idea. It dawned on him in 2020 when his wife of more than 50 years Tricia, who has Alzheimer’s, went into a care home. “Because she was very confused, I went in with her, “ he explains. He took with him a tablet on which he could show her photos and stream video. “I could play clips, I could turn the television on, and she loved it. “

But after he had to leave her and go home, Tricia was unable even to turn the television on, and could not operate a digital photo frame supplied by her son to give her access to some family memories. With a strict Covid lockdown in force, she went into a decline:

“The fact is that she was fine when I was with her and then she went through all the nightmare of isolation for 17 weeks and her Alzheimer's got worse and worse. And all that time. I believe that if she'd had proper stimuli, she’d have been much better and much slower to degenerate.”

Michael says sorting out poor connectivity is the first priority - he says 7,000 care homes have no wi-fi and elsewhere it is often very poor, with busy staff understandably not focused on fixing things if there is a problem.

But the former TV executive has two further proposals, what he calls the Walled Garden and the Jukebox, which together would provide a dementia friendly media service for care homes.

The Walled Garden would be a collection of copyright cleared audio and video content tailored to the individual person with dementia. Michael Blakstad says that his wife, for instance, preferred video clips to whole programmes: “We went on to YouTube and that’s what she likes - she loves the clip with Michael Ball singing ‘You'll never walk alone’ along with Captain Tom.”

The Jukebox is the key which opens the door to the Walled Garden, a simple device to access and stores the digital content. “It’s something where you press a button and get what you want - it’s nice and simple,.” He says too often tablets and even television sets are much too hard to navigate and his device will make the right content easier to find and will be safe and secure.

Now this is a hugely ambitious project. Getting the connectivity should not be too much of a challenge, setting up a kind of Britbox for care home residents might be possible, but designing and building a dedicated device could prove a very lengthy and expensive process.

But Michael Blakstad seems undaunted - he is already talking about running a pilot project in a couple of care homes this autumn. He sums up why this matters:

“The most powerful means of entertaining and amusing people with cognitive problems is not available to them for all the wrong reasons:  lack of money and infrastructure, on the one hand, and the unnecessary complexity of the technology involved in logging in and selecting content on the other.”

This feels like a cause whose time has come and one where a bit of investment from the tech giants could make a big difference. Let’s see if they step up to the plate.