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MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

jan.miksovsky.com

11–20 of 259 posts

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#11
When I watched the film Memento, I found myself thinking 'holy shit, I'm not quite far away enough from this...'. No tattoos yet, but one could write a book on the stcky pads I've laying around.

As a bit of a luddite, e-ink is one of the few modern wizbangs I'm enamored with. It's so damn nice I take it as an inside woosh joke that it isn't everywhere and available without pawning my organs.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#12
This is one of the few HN articles that have profoundly moved me. Such a beautiful and simple use of technology to make a clear and big improvement in someone's life.

As a side note on his mother remembering that the tablet exists, it sounds like she has amnesia quite like Henry Molaison, a famous case study in neuropathology. He had very specific brain damage that seemingly stopped him forming new memories in the same way as OP's mother, but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. So for example he would have warm feelings towards people who'd been caring for him despite not remembering them, and would also pick up card games more and more quickly as he played them repeatedly despite saying he didn't remember the game. OP's mother remembering the tablet sounds very similar, particularly when paired with the feeling of being remembered and loved by her children.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#13
post #6

Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears. For exampl…

If I'm right that this condition is like that of Henry Molaison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison - then the real difficulty is that you don't remember that you have amnesia.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#14
post #3

What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury. This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest…

https://crowdfund.news/crowdfunding-project/blotch-the-world... funded recently and there are others with similar if perhaps less slick implementations on the software side.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#15
post #6

Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears. For exampl…

Sign language and brail come to mind as useful in this regard (if not for you, then for a loved one).

As for amnesia, it seems like a habit of making notes and seeking out to read your own notes would be useful. However, the trend in technology to constantly change behaviour, appearance, and functionality makes anything digital a barrier. Manual notes are also susceptible to being impossible for ageing people to make. So it's really hard to think of something.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#17
post #6

Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears. For exampl…

I have visited the thought of what it’d be like to have amnesia like this many times throughout my entire life. I am sure reality is nothing like my thoughts, but in fantasy land it’s just interesting to imagine picking up a note in my own hand writing saying “you have amnesia, everything is okay, everyone is well and happy, some bathroom humor, go watch YouTube and chill”

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#19
> One small challenge was maximizing the size of the message text. Sometimes a message is just a word or two; other times it might be several sentences. A single font size can’t accommodate such a wide range of text content. I couldn’t find a pure CSS way to automatically maximize font size so that a text element with word wrapping would display without clipping.

> I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.

Wow -- not just for accessibility but this seems like a very useful feature to have in native CSS.

Nice find.

Overall such a heartwarming use of technology. Love.

Re: MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

#20
a commercial product along the same lines is KOMP https://komp.family/en/. We had it to communicate with our elderly grandparents until they died. Its a bit like a senior accessible social network feed for the family, including its dynamics, because the app shows what is being shown to everybody else of the family. In that regard it's a disadvantage you have some of the same dynamics going on. You dont only communicate to the grandparents, but also to the (extended) family.
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