By Beth Lipoff — Correspondent
When creating new memories is a problem, revisiting old ones can be therapeutic. That’s what Concord resident Kristin Nelson found when playing personalized recordings for her mom, Barbara, throughout Barbara’s time living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Seeing how her mom interacted with these audio memories sparked the idea for Audivi, an app where people can make such recordings, paired with a photo. Nelson said she has seen that when someone with dementia is dealing with anxiety or depression, listening to the stories on Audivi can help them break out of that spiral.
Memories of her youth
Spending every day together, Nelson noticed her mom, Barbara, who lived at Newbury Court, would tell stories about her own childhood over and over.
The memories that really stuck for Barbara were from her late teens and twenties, like driving across the country and attending boarding school. She didn’t talk about her five children or her 50-year marriage.
After putting these on a personal website and pairing each story with a photo, Nelson played them back for Barbara.
“It was the ‘aha’ moment of realizing she not only liked to tell those stories but she really liked to hear them. Every time she listened, she would act out the story. She’d laugh. She’d finish her own sentences,” Nelson said.
Each Audivi track has a maximum length of two minutes, with one photo as the visual, and longer stories can stretch over multiple tracks, each with a different image. Then, all you have to do is click play on one, and it runs through the playlist.
‘The most wonderful person’
Nelson’s story began after her father died, when her mom moved to Concord, just a mile away. Seeing that her mom was often confused and needed help, Nelson quit her job at Partners in Health in Boston to be her caregiver.
“She was just the most wonderful person, and I wanted very badly to help her in whatever way I could. The hardest thing in her case was this really profound short-term memory loss,” Nelson said.
If you can’t remember what was just said, it’s hard to have a conversation or a game of cards. Nelson worried about her mom becoming isolated and not being able to connect with people.
Barbara passed away in 2022, but through these recordings, her voice remains.
‘A very lucid conversation’
Having that playlist for Barbara to interact with on her own took some of the load off Nelson’s shoulders as a caregiver.
Later, Barbara moved in with Nelson’s sister, Karen, and brother-in-law, Danny Greenberg. Greenberg saw how the recordings helped Barbara.
“If you sat with her with Audivi and she could look at a picture and hear her voice say, ‘Well, every year, we came from Kansas City to New York,’ her reaction was, ‘That’s right. That’s true.’ And she could almost walk away from Audivi for a little while and have a very lucid conversation with me about that memory,” Greenberg said.
Audivi is available through Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store.
