Reminiscence therapy is an established technique designed to help people with dementia by stimulating memories through activities and conversation.

To build on this, I came up with the idea of a digital scrapbook to collect photos, videos and music. These items could be dragged on to a timeline and exported to a DVD. This idea won last year’s Microsoft DesignIT competition. The judges drew up the shortlist but the public chose the winner, which, to me, shows the growing awareness of dementia in the UK. I won £15,000 for development work, which meant access to Microsoft’s web developers.

The DesignIT competition is open to all IT professionals, whether they work for a charity or not. But the fact that I work for the Alzheimer’s Society meant that we had the resources to put together two focus groups. We also plan to use Talking Point, our online forum, to test the idea.

We conducted the focus groups at Microsoft’s offices in Victoria, one with carers and one with people who have dementia. Both groups thought it important that family members could populate the digital scrapbook and then show the DVD to care home staff. The scrapbook could then help staff to gain an understanding of the person behind the condition. One of the fears was that family members would misuse the scrapbook as a memory prompt, and it would need to be clear that that is not the aim.

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We plan to use existing websites such as Facebook and Flickr to pull in content. We are also working out how to use music, which we feel is very important because of the way it can help people to recall a memory.

I envisage that the software will be free to download, but it may be that, after a certain number of memories are added, we ask people to make a donation to the charity.

Charities have limited new media budgets, which means that I have to concentrate on the bread-and-butter things such as developing our main website.

Last year the digital scrapbook was a “would like”, now it’s a “will have”. That’s why I entered the competition. Often IT is viewed as the boring geeks who deliver things. But IT people are creative and this is just one example of how we can come up with the ideas needed to deal with real-life problems.

Memory Lane

The scrapbook [idea] is something which is quite dear to my heart,” says Bruce Bovill, whose wife Janice has mixed dementia.

When Janice moved into a care home in 2001, Bovill plastered the walls of her room with photos of their life together. “I did it mostly for me,” he says. But he believes that it has affected the way staff care for his wife.

Bovill says that professional carers will be one of the main groups to benefit from the digital scrapbook. “They see people at the worst stages of their illness,” he says. Instead of seeing people for their sometimes strange behaviours, this would “engineer a change in the way you see them”.

The scrapbook will need to be easy to use, he says, because potential users could range from grandchildren to a 90-year-old spouse. He is keen to test it out.

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