She was never really one to sit down and watch the telly or listen to the radio, instead she was either doing something or talking and spent the best part of her life as a carer, first for her many siblings when her own mother became ill and died, then for her children and later on as a social worker dealing with the families of children with a variety of learning difficulties. It's not been at all easy for her to become the person being cared for as opposed to the person doing the caring.
In the last few years she had got into the habit of sitting in a favourite chair and listening to CDs, though these were getting in a tremendous muddle and, to cope with her failing sight and loss of memory, often got covered in explanatory stickers which weren't always on the non working side of the discs.
To try to deal with some of her distress we took the CD player and discs into the home only to find that the CD player was no longer working and so I purchased a cheap replacement. But the controls were fiddly and when the machine didn't work as expected she had no idea why. Often it was because she'd switched the socket off at the mains, sometimes it was in radio mode, sometimes she'd put the disc in upside down.
Last week this new CD player stopped working as well. We suspect it was because of the paper notes saying THE CD PLAYER DOESN'T WORK that had been stuffed into the mechanism.
Giving up on the idea of her ever being able to use a CD player again, the mechanical complexity is just too much, I began to think what sort of radio she might actually be able to use for herself.
There are ones on the market where the main controls (volume, tuning etc) are hidden behind a close-able flap and all that's left is a single on/off button. Now whilst this might satisfy a need for sound of some sort what it wouldn't satisfy for her is her need to fiddle and we think that having some sort of control over the device is actually more important for her than the sounds that come out. So, I began to think about what sort of controls a dementia friendly radio should have that she could safely fiddle with.
1) It needs a simple ON/OFF control with a light that goes on if it's on and off if it isn't.
2) It needs a volume control that doesn't quite go down to zero; if it goes to zero than you can't tell if the volume is right down or the radio isn't actually switched on.
3) It needs a single control to access pre-set radio stations; and some way of setting these pre-sets that it would be hard for her to fiddle with but easy for someone else.
4) It needs to look like the sort of radio she's familiar with from a time she can still remember.
So, the design I came up with is this
Dementia friendly radio
All of the controls are rotary. They follow the traditional pattern of of on/off, volume, tuning.
The control to do the pre-sets would be using a recesses rotary dial at the side. Just like setting a watch you'd pull it out to tune into a station then push it back in to set the selected pre-set to that station.
With a radio like this she could turn it on and off, she could make it loud or quiet and she could change the station.
A non exhaustive internet search has failed to come up with anything suitable so I'd be pleased to hear if such a thing does exist.
