FACEBOOK users have been invited to experience what it is like to live with dementia.
A new FaceDementia app, created by Alzheimer's Research UK, is designed to ‘take over’ personal Facebook pages, and temporarily erases important memories, mimicking how dementia affects the brain.
Users can watch their personal photos, important details and status updates gradually disappear, although their real page remains intact.
Rebecca Wood, chief executive of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Facebook’s appeal is that it can gather your friends and family and keep them close, with memories and contacts all contained within one space.
“It also develops a diary of your life since you joined the site and documents your thoughts and musings during that time.
“We wanted to use these Facebook features to illustrate how those thoughts and memories can be confused, or forgotten altogether, as experienced by some of the hundreds of thousands of people across the UK living with dementia.”
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