Innovation and Alzheimer’s
Simple ideas to improve lives
Last week I had a meeting in the heart of the City with a man running an interesting new venture. It’s an accelerator - a fund handing out seed capital for startup companies with innovative ideas. But all of these businesses had to have one mission - improving the lives of people with dementia.
My meeting was at the headquarters of the Alzheimer’s Society with the charity’s head of innovation Simon Lord, who runs the accelerator. “We invest up to £100,000 in ideas that we think could be transformational for the day to day lives of people affected by dementia,” he explained.
Just as with Parkinson’s there is a major research effort underway to understand the causes of Alzheimer’s and try to find drugs that may at least slow its progress. But that’s not what Simon and his team are about - the innovation unit’s job is all about the here and now and finding ways to make things better for people with dementia and those who care for them.
They’re a bit like a university spinoff fund, putting academics and entrepreneurs in touch with the customers for their ideas: “What we want to find are solutions that are developed with people living with dementia, because they are the solutions that tend to work best.” The accelerator has only been going a couple of years but has already had a couple of big hits.
The first sounds incredibly simple but is a product designed to deal with a major problem - dementia related dehydration. Jelly Drops are sweets with a 95% water content and Lewis Hornby, the founder of the company behind them, came up with the idea because his grandmother was hospitalised with dehydration while living in a care home.
He spent weeks in a home observing what happened and noticed that many people simply forgot to drink enough water, and hard-pressed care workers weren’t spending enough time reminding them, or helping them to drink.
“But he did also notice,” says Simon Lord, “that whenever anyone brought in Milk Tray or a box of Thornton's, everyone knew exactly what to do with that - they would dive in for the sweets. So he basically just combined that insight with a level of engineering prowess that I'm very jealous of and developed from scratch these hydrating sweets.”
Jelly Drops are already in the hands of thousands of people in the UK and have just launched in the United States.
The other big hit is a little more hi-tech, a cuddly toy called HUG that effectively simulates being given a hug. “It's weighted, it's got a heartbeat built into it. It taps into maternal or paternal instincts to some degree. And it's been shown to reduce agitation in people living with later stage dementia.” The toy also has an inbuilt music player that can be programmed to play the user’s favourite tunes
Back in 2019 HUG was tested in care homes by the Cardiff University academics behind the product. But when they came to the Alzheimer Society’s accelerator programme they still hadn’t turned their idea into a business:
“The work that we did with them was kind of facilitating that,” says Simon Lord, ‘helping them get to a stage where they could redesign for manufacturing because up to that point, all of the HUGs that they built were being hand stitched.” The academics now have a business, HUG by LAUGH, selling the product through its website and it is also available from the Alzheimer’s Society.
The accelerator is just one aspect of the work of the charity’s innovation unit - the larger part is a series of projects it undertakes, many with commercial partners, to address issues raised by their community. The one that interests me in particular - as someone who’s struggled to help a relative with their financial affairs - is an attempt to make banking work better for people with dementia in partnership with Santander.
So far, the main idea to come out of the project again sounds simple - a bespoke phone line for people with dementia with staff trained to deal with situations where they might have only partial information. At a time when human interactions are being replaced by apps and chatbots this might sound counterintuitive but Simon Lord says it could make economic sense:
“Most people moving to online solutions means that, in theory, banks might have more resource to put into frontline solutions where they're necessary. That could be good news for everyone.”
And that sums up a general truth about inclusive design - making things work for people with disabilities, whether that be banking or smartphones, is often good news for everyone.
By the way, I’ll soon have news of another major initiative to use technology to improve the lives of people with dementia. Look out for that here.
It is often the simplest ideas that have the most impact. I feel this is something more charities should be doing (if they are of a sufficient size to support it), or at the very least, they could try to leverage their influence to set up funding competitions on the likes of Innovate UK or a new venture investment arm of the NHS to identify relatively low cost high impact treatments/products/systems.
In my day job we often get approached by people with conditions, who have an idea for a product or service that would help them (and by extension, others with the same or similar condistions). But the issue is always funding. Every single time.