Bright Wings

Robots to care for elderly

An alarming post on American blog Our Parents suggests that robots could be taking over some aged caregiving duties within the next three years.

Through a combination of speech, gesture, and touch recognition caregiver robots will aid elderly people in a variety of ways.

Rest home caregivers struggle to provide meaningful interaction with elderly in their care now as underfunding of the sector means that resthome staff are very stretched.

Although a robot may remove the risk of human error when administering medicines, for example, they will also lack the personal connection that we, as humans, need. And attempts to make the robots too human-like may backfire because of a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley:” when a robot or animated character is too lifelike people will react with revulsion. Psychologically, we cannot handle machines that are too perfect and lifelike.

I hope no-one suggests bringing this to New Zealand.

Information retrieval in older people

Fitbrains have provided an interesting observation on my recent post, Brain Fitness and Alzheimers

First, the memory changes associated with normal aging are not a disease. The typical pattern of memory change with advanced age is a deficit in retrieval. A healthy older brain can encode information because the hippocampus is relatively healthy. This permits new information to be encoded. The older adult has some difficulty retrieving that new information, but with cues and prompts they retrieve the information as well as those in their thirties.

In contrast, a brain with AD has a damaged hippocampus that prevents new information from being encoded. This means that new learning does not take place and that cures and prompts do not help because the information is not there to be prompted.

In general, a healthy older adult encodes new information, but needs some help in retrieving what has been encoded. A brain with AD does not encode new information and therefore cues and prompts will not help with retrieval.

www.fitbrains.com is a website full of brain games to keep your brain at peak condition, together with some initial five-minute tests to see how you stack up on areas which affect brain fitness. They also offer a personalised brain fitness programme as well. 

Note: the information on my earlier post was taken from the Alzheimers' New Zealand site, to mark Alzheimers' Awareness Week.

Brain fitness and Alzheimers

Those of us who are a little past the first flush of youth often worry whether we're on the slippery slope to Alzheimers when we

    * Walk into the kitchen and forget what we went in for
    * Misplace our keys
    * Forget the names of people
    * Don't remember a specific place or brand name("Tip of the tongue" experience)

Rest assured, these experiences are normal and don't indicate a Alzheimers/dementia problem.

However, there is a cause for concern when memory loss starts to affect the daily life of a person.

Common signs of dementia:

    * Recent memory loss that affects job skills
    * Difficulty performing familiar tasks
    * Problems with language
    * Time and place disorientation
    * Problems keeping track of things
    * Repeatedly misplacing things and putting them in inappropriate places
    * Changes in mood
    * Personality changes

There's a strong focus these days on brain and physical fitness and social interaction as a way of reducing the likelihood of Alzheimers. Keeping your brain fit can be as simple as doing a crossword each day.

Vibrant and healthy aging: tips for brain health and successful aging is full of interesting stuff on the importance of physical and brain fitness, how to improve your memory, etc.

Alzheimers New Zealand has a wealth of interesting material and resources on Alzheimers and other dementias, assistance available, etc, and is essential reading for anyone caring for a family member diagnosed with Alzheimers. 

The Alzheimers Reading Room, was begun to describe the Alzheimers journey of an elderly woman - his mother - and his journey as her caregiver, interspersed with posts on new research, treatment and other really useful information.  To quote Bob deMarco -

"The Alzheimer's Reading Room is the number one source of life news and health information for the entire Alzheimers and Dementia community. The goal of the Alzheimer's Reading Room is to Educate and Empower Alzheimer's caregivers their families, and the entire Alzheimer's community."