Kodak, Happiness launch AI tool to help dementia patients
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A Belgian marketing company named Happiness has partnered with Kodak to develop “Memory Shots”, which allows people with dementia and their caregivers to place prompts into an AI, which generates images of old memories. On the Memory Shots website, people can click a link to create their own AI-generated memories. All you have to do is type in a prompt — like “a photograph from 1973 depicting a woman sitting on a lawn with a dog” — and the platform will spin out several different images, based on the style of Kodak camera from that year, according to McKnights Long Term Care News.
Caregivers can then start a conversation with their parent, loved one or patient, asking if the AI got it right or if they should add new prompts and directions to get it closer and closer to the real memory.
Hantson, along with several people on the collaborative team, have parents with dementia — one of their driving motivators in developing the project, he said. Hantson noted that while dementia is mostly marked by memory loss, it can also result in a breakdown of communication, and this was a problem they wanted to tackle.
“What we noticed is that dementia is also a problem of communication, because at a certain point communication just stops,” said Geoffrey Hantson, CCO of Happiness, in an article on Medical Marketing and Media. “The second thing we noticed is that sometimes [people with dementia] have a fantastic, cherished memory, but there is no picture of the memory.”
“My father, for example, had a beautiful memory about how he had a horse when he was a child, but there aren’t any pictures of that,” he continued. “So we initially thought, ‘What if we could create pictures from memories where no picture exists? How would patients react?’”
The partners drew on a growing body of research for a type of dementia and Alzheimer’s intervention known as reminiscence therapy. The idea behind it is to use certain markers — like music, pictures, stories or environmental details — to trigger memories in people with the neurodegenerative conditions. Research has shown that reminiscence therapy may not necessarily slow down the disease, but it can lead to a reduction of stress and anxiety, and improve patients’ quality of life. One 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology also found that reminiscence therapy resulted in a significant increase in remission from depression.