Back in February Facebook released their Look Back videos, to show users when they joined and some of their highlights. An entire life (or the online portion at least) condensed into 62 seconds. But imagine if some of these moments started to disappear. Not just from the internet, but from your memory, lost forever.
Alzheimer Research UK have released an app (or ‘experience’ as they’re calling it) which does just that. It asks you to log in to Facebook and then generates a personalised story. It shows your pictures, friends and status updates, then shows them becoming muddled and some even disappearing entirely. Loved ones and treasured memories, slipping away, just as they do in real life for the 820,000 people in the UK affected by dementia.
The experience was built with input from a host of volunteers who suffer from dementia, to try and give it an accurate feel. You can pause the video at certain points to watch clips of people affected by dementia talking about their symptoms and the impact it has on their life, and the lives of those around them.
Of course your data isn’t really deleted. Everything reverts back to normal straight away. But, as the video points out, this isn’t the case for real sufferers.
It’s a very clever way to show a problem in a more relatable way, to raise awareness. You can take a look for yourself, and it gives the ability to donate at the end of the video to support the work of Alzheimer’s Research UK.
http://www.facedementia.org/
