WHEN Susan Ryan's father Ray was diagnosed with dementia at 68, it was a shock.
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"He was actually quite healthy otherwise," says Ms Ryan, a former teacher who was ironically researching dementia as part of a social science degree at the time.
Worse was to come. When he entered a Hunter nursing home, Ray was given anti psychotropic medication after surgery. Upon discharge from hospital, an error was made whereby he continued to take the medication and suffer side-effects.
Realising the error, Ms Ryan called in specialists whose assessment revealed a healthy man who was simply lonely. "They gave him a computer tablet with games on it but he needed more," she said.
She moved him to a nursing home close to her home but realised that "no amount of visiting was enough to fill his bucket."
"I started thinking, if we could bottle care you would be doing well, because it wasn't just Dad who had the problem, but it was me as a carer and the nursing facility," she says.
A sense of "carer's guilt" drove Ms Ryan to develop Uukoo, a social platform designed for dementia patients to boost connection to their families and community.
Uukoo allows families to upload videos and photos for the dementia sufferer to see. They can also send messages, create a calendar and timelines and family histories.
Being a former DJ, Ray loves music - a proven panacea for dementia patients - and has it on his Uukoo, which he calls a "cd player".
"Uukoo can be used right from the onset of dementia until the end of the disease, which is what makes it different," Ms Ryan says.
She cites research showing that 80 per cent of elderly Australians receive similar medications to the ones her father did as a "first line of treatment" and 6000 of them die. "If you use social inclusion rather than medication, the prescription rate drops by 75 per cent and the death rate drops to 4500," she says.
Uukoo will soon be trialled in a Hunter nursing home and Ms Ryan plans to add features, adding the app can help anyone "with cognitive decline, or anyone who needs connection."
