Just wanted to write a post about my father, and how his circumstances were helped by my iPhone at the time.
Back in 2010, my father suffered a couple of strokes. The first went undiagnosed as the hospital thought he’d simply had a bad fall. The second was more serious and he temporarily lost the use of half his body, and speech. He was in hospital for almost a month, and during this time my mother and I visited him regularly.
After the first week, he was able to say yes and no to things, however we soon realised that these responses could actually mean anything, and usually not what we assumed them to mean, and the hospital staff were equally perplexed. I had the idea to see whether writing Yes and No on a piece of paper for him to point at may help. Surprisingly enough they did. No matter what he said, he always pointed to the correct response on paper.
This started me thinking, about a notepad he could use, unfortunately he was unable to write at the time, so I started to write a series of what I hoped would be common questions he may ask, and answers to things so that he could just point to them. It proved too cumbersome for him to hold the notepad and flip pages with one hand though, and it seemed that having a lot of things on one page also confused him.
During a session with one of the consultants, it turned out that the notebook idea had been tried by the occupational therapists already, and they deduced that he wasn’t ready for that yet, however he was recovering, so it could just be a matter of time before it would work, or that if we wait longer, he could simply regain movement and speech to some as yet unknown degree.
That wasn’t good enough for my dad though, he was clearly getting stressed by not being able to communicate, and frustrated by not being understood. I had to do something. He was 76 at the time, had a PC and a laptop, and a modern mobile phone, so quite technically capable and IT literate. Perhaps I could do something with the laptop? I created a few web pages with sub sections of questions and answers, so in theory, he could move the mouse pointer to click on the sections he wanted. It meant that not all of the information was on the screen at once, so it should be less cluttered and easier to use.
The laptop idea turned out to be a bit too complicated, and more cumbersome for him to use than the notepad idea, and it actually caused him more stress as he clearly wanted to try, but was unable to use it. It gave me hope that there may be an easier solution though, so I started to think about the problem more. having a laptop on a bed table, and moving a mouse pointer was difficult for someone with movement and mobility issues.
Perhaps if I did the same thing on my iPhone, he could tap on the links. He should be able to hold it in one hand, and use his thumb quite easily.
It worked to a fashion, although he did tap other things out of a strange new curiosity and get lost in the links quite a lot. But the overall idea was working, so I did some research.
I learned that the speech issue was called aphasia, and that there are some rather expensive touch screen computers with buttons that people can speak to talk via the computer’s artificial voice. They could ask questions, answer them, and tap out custom responses (sometimes with help from someone else). So my idea wasn’t that ground breaking or original, but it meant I was on the right path.
It turns out that there was an app available for the iPhone to help people with aphasia, I chose one called Small Talk Aphasia just to try it.
This worked perfectly, and within the app, he found it very easy to find his way around it and use it. Fortunately by this time though, he was already starting to regain more of his movement and speech, and it seemed a bit redundant to try and get him to carry on using my phone with the app each time we visited.
I hadn’t considered using a smartphone right at the start though. It could have been any small mobile device though, like an iPad, or Android tablet, the thing was that nobody at the hospital had considered it, and there didn’t seem to be much about it online other than very expensive dedicated computers designed specifically for the task.
I have told this story to several people over the years when the conversation brings up strokes in other peoples families. I know I helped at least one person, who’s story I’ll post on here also, so it left me with the passion to try and see if there are other ways cheap off the shelf gadgets can help improve peoples lives.
Gadgets 