Wisdom-Connect was borne as an idea following a lot of awful stories.
I started my training as an old age psychiatrist. As a registrar, I was asked to review several patients that, I was told, were essentially untreatable. I soon found that wasn’t really the case – there were many patients who suffered from mental illnesses that were certainly treatable. There were also many who were lonely, and isolated, living in giant houses as the sole occupant standing. When given the right environment, they flourished. Regardless of the background, or the experience, what I loved was the stories.
There were so many stories. I remember the first patient I ever saw as a medical student, to whom I turned up with a large template with headings, as I thought that was the way one took histories. The man went on to discuss his life history and philosophy, and a 20 minute interview turned into three and a half hours. In going on to work with older adults, I was amazed at the stories that I got to hear, and the knowledge they had.
Knowledge which was wasted.
I remember thinking that these “patients” deserved so much more. My experience was backed up by the research, it seemed – the Harvard Study of Ageing identified that the practice best associated with happiness in later life was the opportunity to transmit one’s knowledge to the next generation. With a colleague, in 2015 we started Wisdom-Connect, and started speaking to residential aged care facility staff, carers and residents, to lay the framework to our idea. The plan was to create a simple portal, deployed in aged care facilities, that would allow residents to be able to connect to other residents. They would also list their interests, and in doing so, would be a potential source of contact for the general public to ask them questions. We added a privacy lawyer to our group in order to encourage safety of the project design, and engaged with several residences.
Our first software development team, unfortunately, did not appear to share our vision. After two years of work, we received an incredibly poor quality product. We found another team, in Europe, that had attempted to do what we were looking to do – they, unfortunately, failed in their efforts due to difficulties in user interface design.
It’s not all bad. We had some remarkable supports – Rotary International provided us with seed funding for our first software tests, Microsoft provided us with free Azure hosting, Baker & McKenzie graciously sponsored us in company formation, and we were awarded Deductible Gift Recipient status in April 2020.
2020, however, was remarkable for, well, a few other reasons.
The pandemic halted many of our intentions in accessing nursing homes, but it also spurred us on in another way, as these residents were now more isolated than ever. We found new partners in software development, and a videoconferencing service that was keen to assist our venture. We weren’t prepared, though, for our next experience.
The same nursing homes that we approached before, who were part of our focus groups and with whom we designed the application, were suddenly strangely cool in terms of interacting with us. We asked for timings for being part of beta releases and software testing, and received little reply. One of our contacts within the industry revealed to us the truth – we were seen as a risk to the institutions. The simple issue, was that the residential facilities were worried that if residents were able to talk to each other, they would discover what conditions were like in other facilities – hence, leading to more complaints.
We were horrified, that the very thing we were trying to fight, it seems was being perpetuated by these same institutions. Isolated, lonely elders are easier to manage.
Today, we have adapted our model slightly, to allow older people who are not in residential facilities to participate. We still hope that a residential facility sees reason and partners with us in the future. Software development is not a straightforward task, and this project is largely self-funded. We have more resources now than we did before, but we still face an uncertain future.
Every so often, I think about how hard this journey has been, and what to do of it. Then I remember that day I stood in a nursing home, about to head home after assessing patients, and saw a patient sitting at a table in the cafeteria, blankly staring ahead. Intelligent, alert, but with no one to talk to. A lifetime of knowledge with no one to share it with.
I think he deserves more.
A/Prof Neil Jeyasingam