Comment by RegBarclay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RegBarclay | Hacker News Reader

My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's last month. He's had symptoms for a couple of years, but as an engineer with a pretty high cognitive reserve he compensated with systems, rituals, and routines, but, mostly, paper systems.

In the 30 years since my grandmother died from Alzheimer's, we haven't made much progress on treatment. I'm now looking ahead about 30 years to the age when my father and his mother both experienced the onset of symptoms and I'm thinking about how I might compensate, keep myself aware of my condition, and remain functional for longer. As a software developer who already relies heavily on software systems to keep life organized, I expect software will play a large role for me.

I believe there's already a market for technology widgets for cognitively impaired people. Dad still likes to surf the internet to read the news and do research about his condition. It would be handy if I could sandbox him a little. Is there a way to rig a browser so a user can't buy anything online? That would be handy.

As wearable tech -- and in 30 years perhaps implantable tech -- advances, I can envision many devices and software aids for those with cognitive decline.

Would be nice, though, if I didn't need any of that because the next 30 years yields an effective treatment or cure.

I've thought about this a lot too. My grandparents stayed mostly functional into their late 80s, but I've developed a really high cognitive load for a few decades and experienced some pretty severe sleep deprivation for a couple of them. There's some genetic predisposition, too. I expect to be semi-functional but forgetful in old age.

So, gradually, I've been building out a software architecture which I hope will be able to help. A simple text-based interface to start, some basic NLP, the ability to interface with a lot of different services. I want something familiar, with not too many dependencies (which is why it's not a web-based interface), that's forgiving of spelling and other errors.

Wait, learning more stuff makes Alzheimer's Disease worse off later? I get sleep deprivation, sure, but I'd have thought that if there is more stuff to forget, you'd be able to 'last longer'.

Sorry, I didn't word that right. You're correct, the current literature suggests that there's a correlation between mental "exercise" and a reduced risk of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

However, there appears to be a link between stress and stress-related hormones and increased amyloid accumulation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2905685/), so if the amyloid theory for dementia is correct, then there's a fine line between "fun" cognitive load and stressful cognitive load.

Ahh! So a 'relaxed' style of reading and learning is the way to go then. Not under a deadline, so to speak. Need to get that cortisol out of the system.

> experienced some pretty severe sleep deprivation

Is this actually thought to cause Alzheimer's? Sleep deprivation leads to temporarily higher levels of a protein known to build up in Alzheimer's patients, but I think this is consistent with an explanation that folks without Alzheimer's clear that protein when they catch up on sleep.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sleep-brain-alzheimers-p...

Last I read, causation hadn't been established yet, although most of what I've read also suggests that "catching up" isn't a thing you can do for long-term sleep deprivation (one really bad example: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-26630647 ... I don't seem to have bookmarked better citations for that).

25% cell death in a cell subpopulation in mice from 3 mights of bad sleep!? That's such an extreme effect from one study in such different animal, it really can't be useful for extrapolation.

> Is there a way to rig a browser so a user can't buy anything online?

Lack of a credit card helps greatly. That may or may not work for your father (I know in some countries it is hard to survive without one these days). The other potential way of doing it is to block the payment processors' DNS. Things like stripe, or the 3D secure site from Visa. Possibly someone has figure it out already.

My mother came to live with us in the early stages of dementia. She had a laptop and was competent browsing the web, so she stumbled onto a pay-for-your-horoscope site, but fumbled with the credit card payment process.

I ended up blackholing the site via the router, just to be sure. She lost interest later that day.

> Is there a way to rig a browser so a user can't buy anything online? That would be handy.

Lack of credit card? Maybe just carefully removing the cvv code from cards?

That's the real answer -- take his cards away. But it's just not time yet. I wonder if there's a card that can't be used online? Hey, dad, your new credit card came in.

I've already learned that one of the realities of being the dementia victim's business manager is that you have to lie to them convincingly. It's for their own good, but it feels wrong anyway.

There's actually a great company that has a solution/card for this: https://www.truelinkfinancial.com/

That's perfect. Thank you!

There are credit cards for internet that need to be charged with money first. They allow you to spend the money that is pre-charged in the card. Not more. There could be still the problem with your data leaking, but I bet that the well known credit cards company though about it and solved that long time ago. You can ask for this cards in your bank.

This doesn't prevent purchases outright, but it allows limitations on frequency and vendor: https://privacy.com

Perhaps just put the banking app on a tablet/smartphone and change the login? (My banking app uses a separate pincode.)

He has no access to banking apps. I have a lot of oversight because he uses an e-mail account on a domain I own and he never did much with online banking, so I've been able to take those things over pretty easily. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have access to someone's e-mail account. And, failing that, a durable power of attorney cuts to the chase right quick.

The harder problem is that we haven't taken his wallet and credit cards away... yet. I have threshold notifications set up on his cards, so I get a heads up on purchases over a certain amount. I'd like to find a way to block him from buying junk $39.95 dietary supplements by crippling his web browser some way.

Does he remember things still? Personally I'd prefer a note saying: check with X before buying anything online. Can you try to get him to send you links to the Items he wants to buy and you start buying them now? Place it under a guise of "I don't want you buying the same thing twice".

Yes. Next time I visit I'm going to put a note on his monitor to remind him that all medications and supplements have to be approved by his doctor, so ask before buying.

LastPass notifies you when you reuse a password, I wonder if you can string match CC numbers and trigger a chrome app to mitigate its use. My grandmother has dementia so I empathize deeply with this post.

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