Vikram's Overall Video Reflection

Here is my final blog post!

Vikram's 5th Reflection

Here is my first video post. I decided to do it on research for Alzheimer's Disease cures. Enjoy!

Vikram's TED Talk Reflection

This is a TED Talk given by Alanna Shaikh, a woman whose father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2005. The disheartening title is "How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's".

Mrs. Shaikh has no substantial reason to expect getting Alzheimer's Disease other than the fact that her father was diagnosed with it. However, she lives in fear of it and is preaching to an audience of normal adults, who may or may not know someone living with dementia. The video itself can be aimed at any audience because no matter who you are, you will grow old if you are fortunate enough to and that is all it takes to be prone to Alzheimer's Disease. She uses the metaphor of Alzheimer's being a "monster" and says "if the monster wants you, the monster will get you" taking a stab at the spontaneity and sheer randomness of Alzheimer's Disease's victims. She goes on to talk about how she is changing her life so that she will be able to perform autonomous tasks if she gets Alzheimer's and that it is actually making her try to change into a better person. This paradigm shift and introspective period of her life is most likely the direct result of losing the ability to communicate with her father well. The extent that she is changing her life may be a little extreme, but it is for the better and reflects just how much Alzheimer's Disease can indirectly impact people through family members and friends.

Lindsey's Overall Reflection

Hi again! Unfortunately, this will be my last blog i post on Becoming best friends. I have enjoyed sharing information about this disease with you as well as sharing all my experiences through out my service hours at this organization. Watch the video below to see my final blog!

Lindsey 4th Rflection

Hey Bloggers! I hope you have been liking my reflections so far. This is my 4th one i will be sharing with you, and i hope you are more informed about Alzheimer's after this post.
-Watch the video below to see my blog-

Katelyn's Overall Service Learning Experience

Friday, April 29, 2016

Hello, all! Thanks so much for following along with our blog. This is my very last post, and I'm sad that the blog is coming to an end, but my volunteering will continue over the summer, and hopefully past that. Please see the video below for my final reflection.

Volunteer Name-tag 

Signing off,

Katelyn

Angela's Overall Reflection

Angela's Final Reflection

Angela's TEDTalk Reflection

This TEDTalk, given by Kenneth Shinozuka who’s still only a teen like the rest of us in CIS112, is about how wandering of Alzheimer’s patients can be a big problem and his invention of smart socks as a solution. These smart socks are designed to send an alert to a caregiver if a patient gets out of bed and the design won him the $50,000 Scientific American Science in Action Award in 2014 as well as being a 2014 Davidson Fellow.

Kenneth start off his Ted Talk by getting your attention with the jaw dropping fact that cancer and diabetes aren’t actually the biggest threats to Americans’ health even though that’s what most people would think. The largest threat is actually Alzheimer’s and every 67 seconds someone in the United develops the disease. In fact, the number of Alzheimer’s patients is said to triple by the year 2050 and around 65% of these patients wander.

After these facts to bolster his introduction, Kenneth goes on to build up his ethos by telling the audience that he grew up in a house with three generations including his grandfather who has Alzheimer’s. He tells us how wandering was a problem for his grandfather, which ended up affecting his own aunt’s health as she was his primary caregiver and had to stay up to make sure his grandfather didn’t wander out of bed. This is what triggered Kenneth’s idea to create smart socks with pressure sensors that could relieve some of the stress on his aunt and other caregivers. He then gives a demonstration and brief depiction of the invention.

Throughout this speech, Kenneth maintains extremely good eye contact and never stutters of uses any filler words so you know that he either really knew what he was talking about or had practiced a ton. However, a lot of his speech is technical as he’s explaining how he created the device and as the camera pans out to the audience, you can see lots of confused or just bored faces. Due to this, I think that his speech could have been slightly improved by reducing the technicality of his explanation so that everyone in the audience would understand it. He also didn’t use very many different facial expressions during the speech since for the most part his face was just neutral. I think that if he’d varied them a bit more, he could have engaged his audience better.

Lindsey's Ted Talk

   4/28/16
       Hello all, and welcome back to the blog!We are going to focus in on something different today. Instead of talking about how multiple get Alzheimer's, and how common this disease is. We are going to talk about how Alzheimer's is not a normal aging process and go through ways we can prevent it. Samuel Cohen did an amazing job talking about this topic and gave some awesome examples in his speech called "Alzheimer's is not normal aging-and we can cure it". He stated that Alzheimer's is a disease, but we can cure it. ( See video below)

      Cohen starts off his speech with a jaw dropping moment that makes us realize that something needs to be done.  144 years ago was when the first patient was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, her name was Auguste  Deter. The doctor that was diagnosing her was Doctor Alois. The most shocking part was when Cohen said that Alois did as much as a doctor would do today to help someone with Alzheimer's, and that was basically nothing. From 1901 we have made no progress in finding a cure for this disease. This is ironic because this is the most common illness.
       Chohen adds in statistics that will blow your mind. He states that 40 million people are affected by Alzheimer's today, but in 2050 there will be 15 million people affected. that is a huge lead and a massive chunk of our population being affected by one disease they have not found a cure for. that will give people a 1 in 2 chance of getting Alzheimer's. making this disease the most expensive one yet. We are already spending 200 billion dollars a year on medications and doctors visits. This prie will increase even more from year to year.
      In 2050 Alzheimer's could pass for just an ordinary disease that everyone gets when you grow up. This should be the case. this is a disease and it should be curable. Alzheimer's is part of the top 10 causes of death world wide, and it is the only non curable disease on the list. It is also the only non preventable disease on the list as well. The reason why we are not finding cures is because we are not putting enough research into it. They spend 10 times more time researching cancer then Alzheimer's and they both have almost the same amount of death rates.
       When Cohen states "Alzheimer's is a disease and we can cure it" he means it. we see Alzheimer's as just a part of getting old rather then a disease. You cannot see how much it truly effects someone unless you put a normal brain next to an affected one. This disease is always fatal, and we need to stop it. A lot of people are unaware of this disease. but we nee to start being aware because even Alzheimer's may be in your future.
       Cohen slowly leads into what Alzheimer's does and what it s caused from. That being, protein molecules. Soon these protein molecules become sticky and clump together. Forming a huge ball of protein molecules hat ends up getting tangles and shrinking the brain. That doesn't really sound that complex if you truly think about it. It makes me wonder why we haven't found a cure. The real reason was because we are unaware of this disease, and are treating it like its a normal thing to happen when you grow old and it not. it is a fatal disease that needs to be taken care of and Samuel Cohen does an amazing job informing us about Alzheimer's disease, how its formed, and how it could be curable. He is also very credible being a scientist that studies Alzheimer's and tries to find the cure. I thought this ted talk was truly inspirational. not only by the way he expressed his thoughts,and emphasized research with slight pauses, but added in a lot of statistics so we know exactly how much he is talk about, and could create a mental picture,

Well that is all for today
-xoxo Lindsey

Emily's Final Reflection

My dear readers and viewers,

Today was, sadly, my final day at the Best Friends Day Center.  Therefore, this will be my final reflection of the semester.  I hope that you have all enjoyed reading about my (and my group members') adventures!

(By the way, if the video will not load, the link to the video is at the bottom of this post.)

https://youtu.be/x_Mm2zCQDAE

Lindsey's third reflection

4/26/16

Dear viewers, 

       After completing more then half of my service hours, I began to realize how complex Alzheimer's disease could be. The last visit I had at Best friends left me thinking about how terrible this disease is. Also how easy it is to devlop this disease even when you are healthy. Anyone could get it. People affected by the disease seem healthy, until they keep repeating the same questions. This had me fascinated on the topic of Alzheimer's. Later that day I dove right into my computer; researching how this disease is caused and how it could affect your entire memory process. 

      This disease Causes you to forget memories and events that you wish to cherish. The downfall is that people affected by Alzheimer's will never be all there for special events in their closing lives. This was a disease worth researching about to find the answers I wanted. It can just come out of no where. There had to be a definite cause. After multiple websites I came up with one picture that truly caught my attention, and helped me 

understand the process better. It displayed facts on how you develop this disease followed by pictures to back up the research. 

      What causes this disease?Well if you look closely at the picture it is all caused by damaged brain cells. It starts off by excessive protein building up in the brain, and then clogging up the passage hole for the neurons. Causing the protein strands to wist to create more room, and they end up damaging the brain cells.While the brain cells die, different areas of the brain shrink. Causing a low capacity of memory storage affecting you to no remember short term memory. The long term memories will always be there, but since the brain shrunk the short term fade away and keep fading away because the brain is at its capacity. Not being all to take any information in that is heard from then on. This causes the patients to forget your name for instance if you just told them it 10 minutes ago. Or maybe forget something that happened the last day you volunteered. 

      Now that i was able to retrieve this information I can understand a little more about each "Best Friend" I talk to at that service organization. Not only will i know more information about the disease so i can be aware of what is going on in the participants thinking process, but it will help me understand the true meaning of the disease. Making me credible toward the research i did and information on alzheimer's. It might not helo me with communicating,= with the patient. That i am going to have to practice with my own strategies. But it will for sure keep me informed for nayone that wants to know about this disease. With greater knowledge of how this disease is developed I can even see the different stages through different patients. Some with more severe Alzheimer's, and some with mild cases. Either way they are all in the same process, but some are indeed harsher and more like taking then others. 

      

Until next time Readers, xoxo

                                                                                               

Katelyn's Fourth Reflection (Video)

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Hello, all!

Please view the video below for this installment of reflection upon my service learning experience at Best Friends!

Butterfly Paintings

Until next time,

Katelyn

Vikram's Third Reflection

Hello, again! Every one of my visits so far at Best Friends has been on Friday at music time. I’ve learned that the older generation is a more refined and classier one. Today, you can still find choirs for youth to participate in but it seems as though most of our elderly friends’ generation has nearly perfect pitch and articulation. Could this be because culture and media was different back then? Perhaps people tried to be more proper and classier back then.

With Auto Tune, nobody needs actual skill for singing and the fundamentals are probably neglected. Also, one must remember that church communities bared a larger significance to community coherence and most elderly in Kentucky grew up in rural communities because cities like Lexington and Louisville were less populous and developed then. Church is where a lot of them learned to interact socially and to sing which could explain why they are all different and more proper.

With all these differences caused by being exposed to more of life and a different life, we can all still find similarities. I always thought that friendship required similarities like common hobbies, cultural and family background, and demographics but now I am finding that polar opposites can make the best match. Maybe what they say is true, “Opposites attract.”

Katelyn's TED Talk Analysis

Monday, April 25, 2016

Hello, all, and welcome back to the blog! Today, I am taking a step back from reviewing my experiences with Best Friends in order to analyze and connect with a TED Talk given by Beth Fauth in 2015 called "Finding Joy in an Alzheimer's Reality" to teach audience members the importance of their roles as caretakers for individuals with Alzheimer's (see video below).

Alzheimer's and dementia are topics which aren't discussed as frequently as they should be, and when they are discussed, they are often spoken of too seriously and accompanied by an air of tension. However, Fauth does not do that. If you have ever been in the presence of someone who suffers from some form of dementia, you'll know that there's probably a funny story or two to share about your experiences. Fauth begins her speech with a light-hearted anecdote from the beginnings of her interactions with Alzheimer’s patients, which hooks her audience, creates a joyous mood to proceed with, and helps to establish her credibility.

Throughout the speech, Fauth uses hand gestures and eye contact with both the camera and audience members, helping to be visually appealing since she has no visual aids or images to show. I would've personally loved to have seen some images, maybe statistics of the disease's prevalence, or of her with the individuals she references, just to help improve the speech for the visual learners. However, her vocals throughout the speech don’t aid in engaging the audience, as she is slightly monotonous and takes many pauses that can cause the audience to lose its train of thought and connection to the moment. Despite the lack of visual aids and not-so-energetic vocalizations, the content is well-developed and effectively helps audience members who are not so familiar with individuals suffering from the disease to better understand why we as volunteers have to go the extra mile to provide joy.

Beth Fauth delivering TED Talk

The purpose of her speech is to help motivate volunteers and family members of individuals with dementia to find happiness for the individuals rather than always finding reality. She gives the example of a woman asking where her husband is, when in reality he’d died three years ago, but her memory doesn’t know that. Instead of telling the woman the devastating truth over and over, Fauth says to respond to her emotions, rather than reality.  “Her reality, her facts are not real, but her emotions are, so we respond to that.”

The speech suggests that “we can validate them that their feelings are real, we can distract them with something fun, and certainly we can provide them some comfort.” Caretakers play a huge role in the quality of life for these individuals, and Fauth’s use of real-life anecdotes and stories is very effective in making the audience feel comfortable and ultimately more educated on the topic. I personally connected very strongly with the message of the speech as it relates so well to my volunteering, and there have been times where I debated on telling the truth of reality or telling the individuals things that would be comforting to them. Now, I can say that as I proceed with my volunteering at Best Friends, I will be a better caretaker by helping to consider the patient’s emotions rather than my reality. Though Fauth's presentation isn't incredibly visually appealing, it gets the message across and the stories keep the audience entertained, she defines terms that her audience may be unfamiliar with, and overall creates an effective speech, helping to promote better care taking for Alzheimer's.

Until next time,

Katelyn

Emily's TED Talk Analysis

Hello lovely readers!

This post is going to serve as a TED Talk analysis for my CIS 112 class, however, the talk I chose will also serve as a good explanation of what those with dementia want.  For those of you who do not know what a TED Talk is, it is a short speech (18 minutes or less) about a topic or issue usually given in a professional setting.  At least, that's what I have come to understand from watching TED Talks.  The link to the TED Talk I have chosen will be found below the analysis.  Now, let's get to it!

Analysis

Alanna Skaikh gave her TED Talk in June of 2012 at TEDGlobal 2012 regarding how she is preparing for Alzheimer's disease (link found below video).  Her speech is titled "How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's".  She begins by stating that her father has Alzheimer's and how it has affected his everyday living.  From how she presented the topic and the statistics she gave, it can easily be assumed that the audience is fairly aware of Alzheimer's and dementia.  When first hearing her speak, I would assume that they were probably thinking that they would be hearing about Alzheimer's prevention, however, Skaikh threw a curve ball and instead spoke of how she is getting ready to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the future.

She brought up many points as to why she was readying herself rather than trying to prevent the disease - although she is doing that as well.  One way in which she does this is through her powerful anecdotes of how Alzheimer's has affected her father.  Her father was a very intelligent man who regularly stimulated his cognitive processes, however, he still suffers Alzheimer's disease.  This very much supports her statement that prevention is not 100% effective when it comes to dementia-related diseases.  While she had no visual aids, her use of personal anecdote and statistics very effectively got her point across to the audience.

Skaikh's use of humor was also very effective.  She made fun of her inability to knit more than a blob of yarn and her lack of drawing skills, yet she used these examples to show that while she may not be good at doing things with her hands, it is important that her hands still know how to do them.  When our mind is stripped bare by dementia, our hands will still remember what to do.  She very aptly explains that all any of us really want is happiness in our state of dementia.  (This relates very much to my chosen topic of independence and dignity in dementia care.)

I believe her scare tactics also helped to get her message across.  By scare tactics, I mean that she gave the cold, hard truth about Alzheimer's and dementia.  She did not leave anything out, and even went so far as to claim that we are all scared of dementia.  Skaikh used the example of her father, a very intelligent and active man, to show that dementia does not care who you are or how you live, because it will find you.  This bluntness really set the audience on edge and forced them to listen to her message.

In all, I believe that Alanna Skaikh gave a very effective presentation about preparing for dementia.  She made great use of personal anecdote and statistics to get her point across.  However, every presentation can use improvement.  In Skaikh's case, I would say that she could improve on visual aid.  This goes for both hand motion and objects/pictures.  Visual aid would greatly enhance her presentation, because she would not only appeal to visual learners, but also show the exact effects that dementia has had on her family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8FyHI00ELY

Angela's Third Reflection

I've been to the Best Friends Daycare center a few times now and while I didn't have the chance to bring my flute with me every time, when I have it's always been a great experience. Before my second visit, I made sure that I went home to pick up all my old solos that I thought I could still play as well as a book of Disney tunes and a stand before going to play for all of the participants. Not only were they one of the most supportive crowds I'd ever had, clapping and complimenting me after every song even if I messed up a few times but they'd come up to me afterwards and tell me over and over again just how much they appreciated my playing. There was even one day when, after I'd finished playing a song, one of the old ladies was in tears and said that my playing was beautiful and reminded her of her husband.

On top of that, after I played one of the male participants came up to me afterwards to ask where I was from. It wasn't until after I told him I was actually born in America that I realized that he was really hoping I'd say something like China or Japan so that I might relate to his stories about his Army days in Japan. The same man also likes to tell a story about the one time a bird got out of their cage in the daycare center and how it was a crazy day with people trying to chase it down. Even though it's an interesting story to listen to, I've found that he tells it almost every week and wonder just how often he tells it since I'm not there that often.

I really think that Best Friends is a great place for people with Alzheimers to go during the day because not only do they have somewhere to go when their families are busy but they can be around other people with situations similar to theirs and extremely supportive volunteers and staff there. One of the members of the staff there is extremely peppy all the time and you can tell that she works hard at her job to make sure all of the participants are happy and comfortable while they’re there, which is something I really admire.

Angela's Second Reflection

At this point we’ve made infographics, written argumentative essays and some of us are even preparing TED Talks about our service learning locations. Personally I’ve decided not to do my TED Talk on Alzheimer’s research although it’s definitely an important topic that people need to be informed about.

Based on the fact that every 66 seconds someone in the United States alone develops Alzheimer’s it’s extremely important that we put forth an effort to get people more educated about the subject and also come up with a cure if at al possible. As the 6^th leading cause of death in the US lots of research is necessary to make a cure possible and to prevent it but with so many of the patients with the disease being no longer capable of making their own decisions, it’s difficult to decide whether it’s ethical to make decisions about things, such as research, on their behalf.

In my opinion, it’s best to not make decisions for patients who can’t do it themselves in regards to participating in research that has unknown results unless it’s therapeutic treatment. Therapeutic treatment meaning that there is a large chance that it only has positive effects and no negative results. I also don’t think it’s right to make decisions about invasive research such as surgery into the brain for patients either. The best way to avoid all these problems, however, is to allow the patient to create an advance directive as soon as they’re diagnosed so that they can make their own decisions about treatment in the future so that their wishes can be best carried out and respected. Although it’s not possible for every patient to do this, as long as patients are diagnosed early enough I think it’s possible to decrease the ethical issues related to Alzheimer’s research.