Memory
Books
History of Memory Books
Michelle Bourgeois developed "Memory Books" when she was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh in 1988. While working closely with Alzheimer's patients, she observed that they did not have trouble formulating sentences, but that it's the facts that troubled them. As an experiment, she put together a collection of facts about a person's life in a booklet they could share with others. The books would have one sentence per page and included a photo or illustration. It might say where the person was born, or something about the person's family. Bourgeois observed that the booklet encouraged Alzheimer's patients to communicate more. "It is the familiar, common information they forget," Bourgeois says. "The book jogs their memory - it gets them to the part that was inaccessible before." The Alzheimer's Association gave Bourgeois a grant to study the memory book phenomena with a wider range of patients with cognitive impairments. She used bigger books with bigger print and received the same positive results. "My research has shown that even patients with severe Alzheimer's Disease can still read personally relevant information if the print is big enough," she says. The Memory Books have been especially helpful as a resource for caregivers who have trouble with a person's behavior. For example, one of the biggest frustrations for caregivers is being asked the same question over and over. The person with dementia cannot remember the answer to that question, but when written down on an index card and put in the Memory Book, they can carry it around with them and read it over and over as many times as they like. "That's a real relief for families," according to Bourgeois. |
The
pages can be put together by making one or two holes on the left side of
the index cards and pulling a ring
