My Story

The Care Act encourages establishing the Life Story of a person, with the aim of facilitating person centred care and enabling providers to build activity and care around the particular wishes, interests and needs of each person. This usually involves pen and paper. ReMe has digitised the process, enabling family to participate and match their profile with automatically generated internet content. The result is a life vibrantly illustrated with bespoke content that grows day by day.

ReMe builds a structured personal Profile by capturing the culture, experience and beliefs that make up an individual. Using the themes that are common to all our lives, school, children, jobs, holidays, a profile is built up by prompting users to describe specific aspects of their experience.

The system automatically sources content from the internet to match these topics that define the person and their Life Story. The result is a uniquely engaging repository of images, video and music that defines the person and that is invaluable in the care process.

Updated remotely or together, the Profile creation and upkeep is shared among those that have been invited to participate; the person themselves, by carers and remotely by family and friends.

With a profile built using the My Story module, carers can better know the person and their ability to deliver person centred care is really enhanced. Furthermore, common themes emerge between users that can be used to promote group engagement.

Importantly, whilst Topics can be made private being shared only with specifically chosen individuals, the collected knowledge in the Profile supports continuity of care across agencies.

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Understanding Through Activity

With an enhanced knowledge of the Life Story of the person, activities such as reminiscence therapy become far more engaging and effective. And new themes and areas of emergent interest can be explored and become the basis for enhanced dementia care.

For families it becomes a fascinating experience to explore their loved one’s past through internet content; their school, favourite holiday locations, music that brings back memories.

ReMe offers the means to travel down memory lane in an enjoyable and productive manner, recording and learning as it explores the past and present.

For carers, the person becomes more interesting, familiar and interaction becomes increasingly rewarding. And importantly, the discoveries enabled by ReMe can open a window into the person’s current experience and perceptions and provide insight into what can engage, provide reassurance and support calming strategies.

Well-Being Reporting

ReMe generates and stores snapshot well-being reports that build up a chart based timeline view of the individual and which can be automatically emailed to family members. It’s simple to undertake, unobtrusive and easily designed to fit the needs of the care organisation.

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The Profile Centre

ReMe builds a structured profile reflecting the unique mix of culture, experience and beliefs that make up an individual. It has the ability to be cross cultural, cross generational and multi- national in its ability to generate content that matches the individual and so can be useful and rewarding for almost everyone.

The key principles used are …

Recognition: being acknowledged as a person. From the simple act of seeing your name represented to the promise of being listened to.

Involvement: being consulted about your wishes and needs rather than being forced to conform to others.

Collaboration: sharing a process in which the person’s own initiative and abilities are involved.

Facilitation: underpins the ongoing activity, gets it started, amplifies responses, and helps the person gradually fill it out with meaning.

Need for Identity: provides a sense of continuity with the past and hence a ‘narrative’, a story to present to others.

Need for Occupation: provides engagement in the process of life in a way that is significant and which draws on a person’s abilities and powers. The opposite is a state of boredom, apathy and futility.

* Descriptions of interactions and needs are derived from Tom Kitwood’s 1997 book ‘Dementia reconsidered: The person comes first’

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Constantly Learning

As activities such as reminiscence sessions are undertaken, the highly bespoke content presented increases engagement and the opportunity for encountering new topics that resonate with the person. As these are discovered, they, and any spoken and written notes made at the time, are recorded and made available for subsequent reminiscence sessions. The care circle is automatically informed of such new knowledge and offered the opportunity to upload content into the new topic. As a result, the Profile is constantly learning and increasingly matches the current interests and popular topics of the person.

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Personal Content

Family and friends can upload personal photos. This personal material is organised into the same Topic structure as the Internet content, making it easy to find and share appropriately.

Personal and Internet content can be interleaved into Photo Albums, presenting cultural bespoke media alongside archived family content and in a multi-media format.

Voice overs can be added to photos so that families can record and attach messages and reminders to treasured images.

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