Tech May Extend Workplace Tenure for Dementia Patients
For Paul, a finance administrator, things came to a head when his report mistakenly included £7,000,000 of costs rather than £700,000. Fearing accusations of fraud, Paul disclosed his recent dementia diagnosis to his boss.
Six weeks of sick leave became six months, and then a stepping stone to early retirement. Several years later, Paul regrets his unwanted unemployment, but at the time there didn’t seem to be an alternative.
Paul was participating in an unrelated study about public transport when he told us about his unemployment. As researchers, we had heard many similar accounts – so we decided to dig down into the research on work and dementia . We were curious about how typical Paul’s experience was of the trajectories of people diagnosed while working.
The ageing of populations around the world is influencing our lives in many ways. More people are extending their working lives beyond traditional retirement ages, and many more are being diagnosed with dementia . Around 9% of the world’s 55 million people with dementia are under 65, with around 370,000 new cases of young-onset dementia annually.
It is striking then, that despite government and business commitments to support longer working lives and inclusive employment practices , workers with dementia are largely ignored. What little evidence we have paints a picture of widespread and unwanted unemployment.
For some, this takes the form of redundancy or retirement. For others – like Paul – a period of temporary leave gradually evolves into a permanent exit.
Alongside workforce ageing, digital transformation is perhaps the single most important development in modern industry. Almost all our working lives are now shaped by digital technologies in some form.
Older people are often stereotyped as technologically incompetent. This can be even worse for people with dementia. When exciting digital innovations are discussed in relation to them, the focus is almost always on providing care . But someone diagnosed with dementia in their 60s today might have been blogging in their 30s, scrolling social media on a phone in their 40s and using a smart home assistant in their 50s.
The reality is that many people with dementia use digital tools every day. This ranges from familiar products like Google Maps to more cutting-edge technologies. A person with dementia recently introduced us to their voice-activated AI companion, with which they watch and discuss films. These companions can provide vital social interaction for people fearing judgement or isolation because of their cognitive decline.
Far from being a barrier, digital technologies could offer ways to help people with dementia to enjoy positive working lives, just as they help workers who don’t have dementia. The trick is to use them to tailor work and workplaces to the individual.
For example, if a worker is struggling to remember appointments, automated and shared calendar scheduling can take care of that. If a worker has impaired wayfinding, mapping apps can be tailored to working environments and live location data can be used to guide staff around complicated sites. This is hardly futuristic tech. Many of us would struggle without our online calendars and maps.
Research shows that touchscreens can be particularly challenging for older people with dementia. To make interfaces more suitable, developers could encourage the integration of voice-operated smart assistants into employee workstations (think of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri).
While discussions of dementia often focus on memory loss, the various types of dementia are associated with a wide range of symptoms. One very common symptom is the struggle to find the right words. But recent developments in generative AI (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT) are proficient at predicting and expressing the next word in a sequence.
These tools are also excellent at transforming text into different formats. Guidance on dementia-friendly information recommends features such as large fonts, single-clause sentences and single-syllable words.
A generative AI tool could quickly transform documents into dementia-friendly formats. The integration of these tools into emailing and writing applications could make a lot of work far more accessible to people with dementia.
These days, it makes little sense for workers to be manually entering costings into a spreadsheet. Dementia or no dementia, these practices are ripe for human error. By outsourcing them to digital technologies, we can free up our ageing workforces to use their unmatched skills, such as networking and experience.
In practice, employers will likely be responsible for supporting positive working lives with dementia in the future. The best way to do this will be to develop strategies, in consultation with people with dementia, that identify interventions suitable for the workplace. Then, when an employee is diagnosed, they can pick and mix a personalised collection of tools to address their needs.
Right now, we are not aware of any workplace that has such a strategy. But many organisations already have robust policies for other conditions. Our own employer, the University of Bath, has a repository of reasonable adjustments that can be tailored to support staff and students experiencing mental illness. Dementia could be approached in much the same way.
The UK government is currently attempting to increase the number of people with disabilities participating in the labour market. It is simultaneously driving an agenda to increase the use of AI throughout the country.
The potential of a digital working life for people with dementia highlights both promise and peril. Simply forcing every person into work is a surefire way of turning challenging situations into real problems. But providing tailored support for those who want to work can enrich organisations and workers alike.
James Fletcher receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
Olivia Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.