My mom was happy with the display right away

November 15, 2024 5:02 AM

Jan Miksovsky's mom can't make new long-term memories, and gets anxious about her family. So he created a simple e-ink display for her: MomBoard.

"Looking back, the display is essentially the only intervention of any kind we’ve tried that’s actually been successful at improving her quality of life (and ours)."

via BoingBoing

posted by Stark (24 comments total)

What a good kid.
posted by Hermione Dies at 5:14 AM on November 15 [6 favorites]

Oh I saw this, it's such a lovely article.

As my father gets older, the finicky, ever changing nature of technology is becoming a real problem. For example there's no way for him to make an online payment from his bank account without verifying the transaction on a smartphone app. His fingers don't register on a touch screen, so he has to get us to help him. And that's just one example.

Every time an icon changes, or something stops being connected, or gets signed out, he's increasingly helpless.
posted by Zumbador at 5:21 AM on November 15 [13 favorites]

Now this is Better Living Through Technology.
posted by JanetLand at 5:24 AM on November 15 [8 favorites]

I completely love this. Thanks for posting it, Stark!
posted by Songdog at 6:38 AM on November 15

My MIL also cannot remember things for more than a few minutes. My wife sees her every day and calls her every night and still she says to her husband, where is my daughter, I haven't talked to her in days.

So yes, it's awful, and yes, this is brilliant. In two weeks my son, a CS major and genius at building out tech devices, will be home from college and we'll try this. Thanks so much, Stark.
posted by martin q blank at 7:09 AM on November 15 [15 favorites]

I love this. This is what humans using technology looks like.
posted by biogeo at 7:12 AM on November 15 [8 favorites]

This is just wonderful. It makes me so happy when someone finds a way to make someone else's life so much better.

I also just love it when people spell out exactly what they did to build something. All those details are both helpful and just interesting.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Stark. I am so glad to have read this today.
posted by kristi at 7:12 AM on November 15 [9 favorites]

This is so kind and thoughtful.
posted by praemunire at 7:40 AM on November 15

This is so so sweet. I wish I could do something similar for my Alzheimer's stricken mom, but his mom has a entirely different set of circumstances that make this work for her needs. I appreciate that he makes the difference clear in his post.
posted by Kitteh at 8:36 AM on November 15 [7 favorites]

His fingers don't register on a touch screen, so he has to get us to help him.

Just for this one issue, if he hasn't tried it yet maybe give styluses a try (the cheap basic kind that work with any phone) - that helped my grandmother a bit. If those are hard to grip, there are a lot of potential workarounds.

Depending on the phone it might also be possible to actually use a physical mouse, keyboard, or pen-style graphics tablet with it - I've done this with my low-end Android phone, for example.

But yeah, "the finicky, ever changing nature of technology" is a current or future problem for pretty much everyone, and the more everything depends on being able to use specific tech the worse it gets.
posted by trig at 9:05 AM on November 15 [5 favorites]

That's great. There was a period that a small dry erase white board was quite helpful for my demented mom who, it seemed, retained her reading skills even after she could rarely speak. This seems like it does offer additional benefits over a white board! Very cool. I could imagine having a couple of these scattered around the house with the same messages.
posted by latkes at 9:48 AM on November 15 [2 favorites]

This is great. Also can confirm - the Whale Wins is yummy.
posted by blendor at 10:05 AM on November 15 [1 favorite]

Hacker News also posted this, and the thread has a lot of useful comments about various products or other ways to make similar signs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135520
posted by Wilbefort at 10:42 AM on November 15 [6 favorites]

Brains are weird. I remember reading an article, ages ago, about somebody with similar amnesia who had never solved the Towers of Hanoi puzzle before his accident. But they tested him with it, and eventually he learned how to do it, but didn't remember learning it and didn't think he knew. But he would do exactly the right steps when given the puzzle, even though he couldn't explain how.

So there are little weird gaps in the amnesia sometimes, and might be found with persistence. It sounds like they found a gap to stick the MomBoard in. Who knows what processes occurred, what connections formed, to achieve persistence for it? It's a miracle of perseverance for everybody involved.
posted by notoriety public at 10:49 AM on November 15 [1 favorite]

When my dad was recovering from a TBI in the 1990s he had trouble remembering where we all were and would ask my mom CONSTANTLY about us. It was driving her batty as well.

She came up with the idea of hanging a posterboard off the fireplace mantel with labeled sections for all of us. We had to grab one of the reusable signs (copy paper with double-sided tape on the back) with our status ("at work" "at school" etc.) before leaving the house. Low-tech, but it helped. This is definitely a level up.
posted by pantarei70 at 12:56 PM on November 15 [4 favorites]

I was hoping this would be like the Weasley Clock, but this is probably better.
posted by aincandenza at 1:34 PM on November 15

there's no way for him to make an online payment from his bank account without verifying the transaction on a smartphone app.

If the app in question is one of the many Google Authenticator compatible TOTP types, it might be useful for you to know that KeePassXC can do the same job internally, and that its browser extension can auto-fill authenticator codes along with usernames and passwords with no extra steps.

2FA is great for people who insist on maintaining shitty password hygiene by hand instead of adopting competent password management software. For those of us who do ensure that every password we use is long, unique per service, machine-generated at random and absolutely not human-memorable, 2FA is completely superfluous so it's nice that my password manager can just deal with it and I don't have to.

My bank created issues for me by picking Symantec VIP which doesn't trust the user's endpoint device with the actual TOTP secret, but there's a workaround for that.

The only services I currently use that actually need me to go searching for my &%#+ing phone in order to complete something webby is MyGov, because it has not yet annoyed me enough to set up the rooted Android environment I'd need to work around it, and a couple of things that insist on relying on SMS codes like the tech-illiterate barbarians they are.
posted by flabdablet at 6:23 PM on November 15 [2 favorites]

Thanks flabdablet.
I use Keypass myself, by chance!
but unfortunately this is the bank's own app.

And he couldn't get a stylus to work either, for some reason. I think it's a combination of cognitive load and dexterity that's making it tough for him.
posted by Zumbador at 2:24 AM on November 16

this is the bank's own app

Which bank, and what's the app? There may be a relatively straightforward way to extract the TOTP secret from it in a form that KeePassXC can use.
posted by flabdablet at 2:27 AM on November 16

It's First National Bank here in South Africa. With their own FNB app.
posted by Zumbador at 2:33 AM on November 16

Oh and it's not a OTP that's sent - as far as I can tell. It's like an in-app message you have to respond to with the app.
posted by Zumbador at 2:34 AM on November 16

Oh OK, it will be this encrypted chat thing. Yeah, that's just a genuine pain in the arse. Not only does he need his phone, it needs an active Internet connection.

TOTP just works. I don't understand why everybody and their dog is out to re-invent this particular wheel.
posted by flabdablet at 3:01 AM on November 16 [1 favorite]

I wonder if you could do something clever on your Dad's computer with an Android emulator. He'd still need to fire up the stupid app inside it, but at least he'd be able to use a proper mouse instead of a ridiculous point-and-swear touchscreen interface.
posted by flabdablet at 3:05 AM on November 16 [1 favorite]

Android emulator might actually work. I wonder. I'm going to look into that.
posted by Zumbador at 3:09 AM on November 16