News - Television

My Fox 5, Washington DC

Claudia Coffey, reporter

Lark McCarthy – By the year 2030 the Alzheimer’s Association predicts more than 8 million people will suffer from that disease.

Bob Seller – And that’s more than double the number diagnosed now. But a new revolutionary technology promises to help battle the effects of Alzheimer’s. Fox 5’s

Claudia Coffey is live in Fairfax with more…

Claudia Coffey – Yes Bob you mentioned those numbers, it’s just completely staggering. Probably many of us know someone who had been affected by Alzheimer’s in some capacity and we know that it truly affects their memory loss.

All morning long we have been at George Washington University talking to Andrew Carl, he developed the phrase and coined the term nana-technology- ways to strengthen the brain, and we mentioned Alzheimer’s, this is a particular program we are going to talk about that can maybe slow the progress of that and its so state of the art.

Andrew: It can help you fight back.

Claudia: And it’s called Dakim?

Andrew: The Dakim [m]Power, stands for memory power, and this is the absolute state of the art in terms of nana-technology for the brain- so this is the future right here.

Claudia: It has no keyboard and no mouse.

Andrew: No keyboard and no mouse. You simply touch the screen. It can remember your face, it can remember your name, it can remember up to 240 different people. So once it comes on it will greet you by name and it will begin to walk you through- and this is the really key part, really fun and enjoyable training exercises.

So what Dakim wants is they don’t want something you do for three months and then you are done.

Claudia: Yea forget that.

Andrew: They want you to do something that you will do for the rest of your life and becomes a habit. It was actually created by- the founder is a former Hollywood executive and he’s got people in his company from Disney and then he worked with people at the UCLA Center on Aging. And what they created was this mix of Hollywood and science.

It is really, really fun.

Claudia: Age appropriate too.

Andrew: It’s age appropriate. So name that song might be a song, if you are 80 years old, that’ll be a song from the 1930’s. And then it will play the song and ask you questions about the song or what you remember about that song.

Claudia: It’s important to know that this is not available to the public just yet.

Andrew: It’s available in senior housing communities, assisted living and retirement communities right now and they are coming out with a home version probably this Fall.

Claudia: OK

Andrew: And that will be the first time that they will be on the Market for people to buy this and use it in their home. It’s a really, really remarkable device.

Claudia: And Andrew, this has just been remarkable information all morning long. Thank you so much.

Andrew: You are very welcome.