Brother with dementia needs help in processing his email - any advice?

April 7, 2013 9:17 AM

I just spend an hour searching for a site I found a few months ago and 'have come up with nothing. My 80 year old brother who has moderate vascular dementia wants to be able to process his email again but it is just beyond him.

He can pull up the email screen but doesn't know how to reply or send.
The site I once viewed broke the steps down, i.e. REPLY and SEND, etc. were printed in large "labels"on the left side of the screen - more or less walked you through the process of dealing with email from opening it to deleting, printing, replying, sending and moving on to the next one in line.
He is very frustrated as he knows he used to be able to do this with ease but now is unable to do so.
I don't know what mail program he has but I'm pretty sure he has Windows 8 operating system.

posted by Tullyogallaghan to Health & Fitness (4 answers total)

It's got a small fee associated with it but have you looked into something like PawPaw mail which is designed to help people with just this sort of thing? Or is this a situation where you just want him to have guidance in learning how to deal with his already existing email situation?
posted by jessamyn at 9:32 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

For my grandmother we made a few paper pages of instructions in large letters with the task at the top (i.e. "REPLY TO EMAIL") and then the instructions would walk her through how to do it.

Ultimately though to spare us a lot of painful attempts at instructions over the phone, we set up her computer so that it could be remotely controlled by my father if she got stuck, he could log in and see her screen and do whatever she needed to do (that kept her from being able to click on the wrong button or window and then try to describe what she was looking at to one of us, being fairly unfamiliar with the technology it was hard for her to describe what she was seeing without confusing us further and causing a lot of frustration, i.e. "do you see the little square in the top left corner of the window that looks like a little "x"?" "no, I don't see that!"). Since she only checked email and responded to it a few times a month, that worked out.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 10:33 AM on April 7, 2013

I think you need to know whether you want e.g. a plug-in for Windows Mail or a website to redirect the mail to like PawPaw. I'm wondering if the product you saw was a competitor like BigScreenLive or RedStampMail. BSL resembles the broader category of senior-citizen-oriented shells such as Eldy or SoftShell (now potentially years out of date/compatibility).

I would also urge you to investigate the accessibility options baked into Windows such as larger screen font sizes, stickykeys, and so forth. Your brother may not need them now but could later on.
posted by dhartung at 2:29 PM on April 7, 2013

I like the idea of the remote desktop (Google's got "Chrome Remote Desktop"; there's also GotoMyPC.com). Then again, you need to consider how private or secure the e-mail correspondence is.

That might require however, that you be available at any time for him; I don't know how feasible this is.

I only now heard of PawPaw mail and similar applications - these might be excellent alternatives as well.
posted by bitteroldman at 8:21 AM on April 8, 2013