Hacker News Reader

Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Reaction: Lovely - but the article notes that it has 152 residents, vs. 250 full- and part-time staff. If more than a very small percentage of a country's older folks develop dementia, and the country's population is not growing exponentially...then such well-staffed solutions are physically impossible to implement at scale, for lack of working-age care staff.

View on HN

My father has dementia. I have some hope that robotics together with AI will make good caretakers for people with dementia. Interacting with him is not very complex. It’s basically just a repeat of the same conversations. Very labor intensive for humans but an AI would have way more patience.

Rather more like infinite patience.

Interesting to hear someone articulate this dynamic. I do not believe my father has dementia but there are similarities in regards to “repeat of the same conversations”.

Wish you and your family well.

My mother has dementia. At present, conversations repeat on about 3 minute intervals. There is significant value to catching early signs of dementia.

What is the value in catching early signs of dementia given that we have no useful treatments for it?

Getting prepared for what is to come for everyone involved?

You might want to read Drop Acid by Perlmutter, stuff about sugar by Robert Lustig and maybe Fiber Fueled by Bulsiewicz. They give pointers to why Alzheimer might happen in the first place and how to avoid it. Those are life-long advices.

There are no cures; but there are treatments that can delay onset, slow progression, and improve quality of life to varying extents depending on which disease.

There was a great post here recently about automating some of this work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35749579

Wow, yeah, I've never thought about this use case for AI. Honestly seems pretty ideal. A relative of mine afflicted with dementia recently passed, and while they still needed physical care, an AI "person" to bounce questions off of and talk to would have done wonders for them, and saved their carer a lot of stress and effort in a difficult time.

Someone here built an amazing tool for this. They should commercialize it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35749579

I can understand the impulse, but boy do I hope my family won’t turn me over to a computer in my dotage. I’d rather be loved than managed.

I would hope the solution would be both... humans augmented by computers so that the humans aren't overloaded and overly burdened.

Love is a burden no way around it. Some burdens are worth carrying however.

We'll just need to create an AI that'll emulate love semi-perfectly.

Let us reimplement love in Rust from first principles to solve this inconvenience. Nothing can go wrong, it’ll be so disruptive and innovative.

Don't engage in negative sum transactions. The burden on families by a dementia patient is often higher than the benefit the dementia patient gets.

Caring for a dementia patient properly is all consuming for the caretakers. You don’t want to do this to your family. Getting help from a robot would be a win win for all.

Seriously. My grandpa had dementia for 10 years. Pretty much everyone in my family doesn't want to inflict that on anyone else.

Senile people are going to love the AIs of 10 years from now, I guarantee you. Once it has perfect audio control and responses, it's going to be like the perfect friend for an old person.

I always thought healthcare for people is not well suited for humans to do. Doctors, yes. Everything else, no. It’s such a demanding job for nurses and hospice care workers to deal with such terrible human situations. Sadly, it will probably be decades before robots could take over for nurses

I don't think that's clear at all.

Working age adults work from their early 20s to their 60s and end of life care does not typically last that long.

EOL with dementia can linger for well over a decade, and it only gets more expensive as it goes on.

Most people don’t experience dementia, and most of those who have it don’t need such extreme care. Taken to an extreme, this radio suggests under 5% of a steady state population would either have significant dementia or need to treat it. But again most such people are cared for by family members.

The point of this Village is to minimize the cost of treating significant outliers while maximizing their quality of life.

So it would need to scale out to 10s of thousands, no?

If everyone with dementia went to such a facility then we would need ~30,000 of them in the US. However, most people with dementia either don’t need such extreme care or have more severe medical issues, so the real number is probably a several hundred such facilities.

To compare, there are about 4,000 Walmarts in the USA. Each employs about 300 people.

>Most people don’t experience dementia

>In the first nationally representative study of cognitive impairment prevalence in more than 20 years, Columbia University researchers have found almost 10% of U.S. adults ages 65 and older have dementia, while another 22% have mild cognitive impairment.

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/one-10-older-americans-h...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...

Sure, though don’t forget 1/4th of American men don’t live past 65, and less than half make it to 79. Dying young isn’t necessarily preferable, but it does impact these statistics.

Dementia is the between the 3rd and the 5th largest cause of death in first world countries, depending on the country, and how you count. Most people aren't currently experiencing dementia, but there's a very significant chance that you're going to end up with it eventually.

The actual question should not be what percentage of the population has it; the question should be what percentage of people will be suffering from dementia to the point that they need assisted living care when they die.

Covid "solves" long-term care sadly.

One worker insists on going to work anyway knowing they are sick because they need the paycheck and no health insurance or days off, and wipes the place out a few weeks later. Top that off with states that insist on allowing workers to not mask and it's almost on purpose.

Ironically covid may also cause a surge in dementia years from now so it's an ouroboros.

What's the patient to staff ratio at typical elder-care facilities?

What's a problem now that won't be around in 2070? Elderly and the disabled...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com