People with dementia could stay in the workplace longer – with the right tech

For Paul, a finance administrator, things came to a head when his report mistakenly included £7,000,000 of costs rather than £700,000. Fearing accusations of fraud, Paul disclosed his recent dementia diagnosis to his boss.

Six weeks of sick leave became six months, and then a stepping stone to early retirement. Several years later, Paul regrets his unwanted unemployment, but at the time there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

Paul was participating in an unrelated study about public transport^[1] when he told us about his unemployment. As researchers, we had heard many similar accounts – so we decided to dig down into the research on work and dementia^[2]. We were curious about how typical Paul’s experience was of the trajectories of people diagnosed while working.

The ageing of populations around the world^[3] is influencing our lives in many ways. More people are extending their working lives^[4] beyond traditional retirement ages, and many more are being diagnosed with dementia^[5]. Around 9% of the world’s 55 million^[6] people with dementia are under 65, with around 370,000^[7] new cases of young-onset dementia annually.

It is striking then, that despite government and business commitments to support longer working lives^[8] and inclusive employment practices^[9], workers with dementia are largely ignored. What little evidence^[10] we have paints a picture of widespread and unwanted unemployment.

For some, this takes the form of redundancy or retirement. For others – like Paul – a period of temporary leave gradually evolves into a permanent exit.

Alongside workforce ageing, digital transformation is perhaps the single most important development in modern industry. Almost all our working lives are now shaped by digital technologies^[11] in some form.

Older people are often stereotyped as technologically incompetent. This can be even worse for people with dementia. When exciting digital innovations are discussed in relation to them, the focus is almost always on providing care^[12]. But someone diagnosed with dementia in their 60s today might have been blogging in their 30s, scrolling social media on a phone in their 40s and using a smart home assistant in their 50s.

The reality is that many people with dementia use digital tools every day. This ranges from familiar products like Google Maps to more cutting-edge technologies. A person with dementia recently introduced us to their voice-activated AI companion, with which they watch and discuss films. These companions can provide vital social interaction for people fearing judgement or isolation because of their cognitive decline.

Far from being a barrier, digital technologies could offer ways to help people with dementia to enjoy positive working lives, just as they help workers who don’t have dementia. The trick is to use them to tailor work and workplaces to the individual.

For example, if a worker is struggling to remember appointments, automated and shared calendar scheduling can take care of that. If a worker has impaired wayfinding, mapping apps can be tailored to working environments and live location data can be used to guide staff around complicated sites. This is hardly futuristic tech. Many of us would struggle without our online calendars and maps.

Research^[13] shows that touchscreens can be particularly challenging for older people with dementia. To make interfaces more suitable, developers could encourage the integration of voice-operated smart assistants into employee workstations (think of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri).

While discussions of dementia often focus on memory loss, the various types of dementia are associated with a wide range of symptoms. One very common symptom is the struggle to find the right words. But recent developments in generative AI (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT) are proficient at predicting and expressing^[14] the next word in a sequence.

These tools are also excellent at transforming text into different formats. Guidance on dementia-friendly information^[15] recommends features such as large fonts, single-clause sentences and single-syllable words.

A generative AI tool could quickly transform documents into dementia-friendly formats. The integration of these tools into emailing and writing applications could make a lot of work far more accessible to people with dementia.

These days, it makes little sense for workers to be manually entering costings into a spreadsheet. Dementia or no dementia, these practices are ripe for human error. By outsourcing them to digital technologies, we can free up our ageing workforces to use their unmatched skills, such as networking and experience.