Surrogate memory

What time is my dentist appointment? Your dentist appointment is 1 p.m. tomorrow.

For seniors with severe memory impairment – often related to aneurysms, strokes, tumours or brain injuries – the only way to answer the first sentence is to program a Palm Pilot to prompt the second.

"The future (for seniors) is not about pouring money into big institutions," says Brian Richards, a psychologist at Baycrest, a Toronto geriatric centre. "It's about teaching people skills so they can continue to live at home."

Richards' breakthrough program, Memory Link, does just that.

"You can't function independently if you don't know what you're going to do next," Richards says. "We all have normal memory failure from time to time, we forget to pick up the laundry, but my clients in the Memory Link program never know what they're supposed to do next."

Sidney Cohen, a 75-year-old former publisher who has mild cognitive impairment, demonstrates. Cohen's Palm Pilot is loaded with a computerized day-timer that includes his wife's schedule; she's active in Holocaust education and he needs to know where she is.

"I can pick any day this year, and I know what's scheduled," he says. "I know where I have to be. At 1 p.m., I get a beep. It says, `Leave for Baycrest.' At 2 p.m., it beeps. `Be at Baycrest.'"

The technology does what the mind can no longer do. Developed at Baycrest and funded by OHIP, charitable foundations and hardware donations from palmOne Inc., the program is based on research that showed different systems of memory can compensate for each other when one system is impaired.

"It's learning without awareness," Richards says. "Over six to 12 weeks, clients can acquire the skill set to use the Palm Pilot reliably without any memory of how they acquired the skills."

Clients are drilled by trainers, including volunteers, until they acquire the habit – the procedural memory – of using a Palm Pilot programmed to tell them where they are, why they are there and what they are supposed to be doing. The trick is, no errors are allowed.

"Trial and error doesn't work when you can't remember your errors," Richards says.

"Once they've got it, they've got it. Like riding a bike."

"Now," Richards says, "all we need to do is roll out Memory Link across the country."

Toronto Star

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