Memojog – An Interactive Memory Aid with Remote Communication

Independence is a defining attribute of being an adult. We guard and preserve our right to determine how and where we live our lives, and the routines that we maintain. These rights are fundamental to the ‘independent living’ and ‘care in the community’ movements of recent years. Loss of this independence is not only demoralising for all the people directly and indirectly involved, but also increases care costs to the individuals, their families, and to the wider community. Conversely, if independence can be maintained, a reduction of the workload of professional carers and reduced health care costs is possible. One condition that can severely affect the degree of independence is the extent to which people can organise, plan and, crucially, remember to carry out even simple everyday tasks. Memory dysfunction can hamper the quality of everyday lives of memory-impaired individuals, leaving them extremely dependent on carers (Wilson et al., 2003). In this paper we describe issues in the development of a memory aid system with remote communication to re-create independence for memory-impaired, elderly people and present data from an evaluation of this system.