The UK caregiving support company Memory Tracks’ vision is to place music at the heart of health and wellbeing. Memory Tracks is providing health professionals, and carers whatever their circumstances, with the opportunity to use music in all situations of treatment and care. We had the pleasure to speak to its founder, Gordon Anderson, about the company, its products, and its objectives.
Thank you for agreeing to catch up with Occhi Magazine. For the benefit of our readers, please tell us more about your background, and how Memory Tracks was founded.
My working life has been quite a mixed experience; beginning with farming and country living, then working through the music recording industry with the major labels, software development with the BBC, mobile platforms and apps that our now our standards, and currently pushing music in healthcare. However, when I plot these varied experiences I have had in the many businesses I have been with, and my strong belief in social enterprise, the current mixture of music, technology, and healthcare does make sense.
Memory Tracks began forming when I was supporting my daughter during her Music degree in Liverpool in 2016. She was using musical elements such as drums and voice to support asylum applicants to improve their mental health and friendships. I persuaded her to carry this experience over into working with people living with dementia for her final year project, and the idea behind the Memory Tracks platform came naturally from this work. We had much-loved relatives living with dementia and lost them in 2017 and 2018, so the idea became quite visceral to us. We wanted to develop a simple tool that used music at the point of greatest need in dementia care, and this was when care was being given, for instance when someone is being moved, washed, dressed, and using the toilet.
I was lucky to put together a small team of clever people who believed in the project, and we raised some funds to carry out research with a large care group in Wales called Pendine Park alongside the University of Glyndwr and Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018. Working with the care staff was one of the most rewarding stages of my career, they are truly amazing, and quite often absolute characters!
Music has therapeutic benefits and is known as a cognitive stimulant. Can you explain the science behind this?
When a memory is recalled, the imagery, sounds, smells, words, and emotions associated are encoded in the same parts of the brain as they were when initially formed and stored. The visual cortex, motor cortex, language area, and then the recall of that memory itself effectively reactivate the neural patterns generated during the original encoding process. This is often referred to as distributed processing. This process of storing memories in different areas of the brain may point to the reason why music can unlock them even after the brain is deteriorating. Music has more points of access to the brain than any other stimuli, five different parts of our brain. If listening to music triggers five neural pathways as opposed to one or two, there are more chances for the brain to recall a memory that relates to this particular music.
In our early research, we tested our theory of song-task-association, the potential of linking a particular song to an individual task for a person living with dementia. The research was inconclusive, working with some, and not with others. With some subjects, we found that alternating songs were better. We found that the magic of music was the ‘trigger of recognition’, and not the linking of songs to individual tasks. However, we still use the term song-task-association to represent the use of remembered songs when carrying out care tasks.
The company works with healthcare professionals and links activities to music. Can you explain your methods of practice?
We have used music in two forms. The primary method of practice is to provide each person living with dementia with a tablet device with the installed Memory Tracks app personalised to their needs and enable their caregivers to use this when providing care. The other method has been through a radio service we installed in a handful of care homes common areas, with popular success. We called this Blue Moon Radio because it was the songs heard only ‘in a blue moon’. We have since closed this service because we wouldn’t secure enough income from it, a sad truth in many areas of elderly care.
Music is an obvious component of your service delivery. How do decipher what music is appropriate for each patient activity?
The selection of the appropriate and effective songs for a particular individual, often without any personal or family input, has always been the block to developing simple music services for dementia care. This is often because people are fixated on needing to know a person’s favourite songs, the songs from their wedding or first dance etc, and this is simply not necessary. We decided to try to solve this challenge in a different way and develop a one-stop solution that anyone could use with little knowledge of the recipient. In true innovation tech language, we call our system of song choice an algorithm, but it is so much simpler than that (don’t tell the investors).
When you start to understand the brain, and how sponge-like it is in early years, soaking up everything around us, it becomes clear that the songs heard in our very early years are going to be hard-wired into our memories. This fits well with the way dementia attacks brain function and memory, in reverse chronological order, damaging recent memory and leaving the earliest memories less impacted until the later stages.
We select the top 10 songs from each year, and we use these as our catalogue. In Memory Tracks this is from 1928 to 1963, so 360 songs. We ask each individual what year they were born, and the platform then selects from these 360 songs those that were top 10 from the years they were between 3 and 12 years old. The second question, yet to be added to the platform, is ‘where did you grow up until 12 years old?’ and this will then select from a different catalogue; French, German, Spanish etc.
Remember, we are looking to foster engagement, not find a person’s favourite song. It is this engagement, that emotional trigger, that we are seeking. This engagement interrupts agitation, anxiety, and confusion, and gives the caregiver an opportunity to connect with the person being cared for. It’s a really simple process, but difficult to put into practice. Agitation alone accounts for 12% of dementia care costs in the UK*, with total costs of over £43b, it represents a significant health cost.
*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6391021
National health services are constantly under strain, with dementia care costing the UK NHS alone billions a year. Is there much financial assistance for research and support in this field?
The cost of dementia in the UK is currently £34.7 billion a year, which works out as an average annual cost of £32,250 per person with dementia. Two-thirds of this cost is currently being paid by people with dementia and their families, either in unpaid care or in paying for private social care. https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/blog/how-much-does-dementia-care-cost]
There has strong been financial support for dementia research. In the past, this was focused on medical research, but as that proved to be frequently fruitless and extremely expensive there was a switch to innovating around broader care services, supporting the care system, and caregivers. It has been a challenge for the funding industry because the potential solutions often don’t fit their growth templates and return on investment criteria. There was a significant chunk of money earmarked for dementia care in 2018, but the agencies involved were unsure how to invest it. The pandemic halted everything for a while and we are now seeing some interesting funding opportunities arising.
There has been a recent welcome look at how social enterprises can fill the gaps, but these still pose a challenge to funders as they often require funding for many years without a traditional financial return. In fact, the return is obvious to anyone who is willing to look at the savings they generate in the health and social care system, but that takes a braver and more creative view of public financing.
I’ve personally seen the benefits of playing music on health conditions. I recall playing music to a relative in a coma at one of New York’s major hospitals and noticed their reaction to the sound. Can you share any cases that clearly demonstrate the profound impact music has played on patient conditions?
My very favourite benefactor was a wonderful lady called Owena in North Wales. She was living with quite advanced dementia in a care home. Her caregivers found her difficult to dress and wash, she had to be fed by staff, and she was frequently incontinent. Using the Memory Tracks app they found they could distract her when washing and dressing, and eliminate the agitation and aggression. When playing the music and putting the cutlery in her hands, she was able to feed herself, presumably distracted enough that her autonomous brain took over and used muscle-memory to put the food in her mouth. The most dramatic change was with her incontinence. She would pick up the Tablet device whenever she needed the toilet, so perhaps not a musical connection, but one that had been initially triggered by the programme. Her life and the lives of the caregivers was transformed.
You’re based in the UK but are your services available internationally?
We launched in the UK, just before the pandemic, and then extended our licensing to the US in late 2020. I hope we can extend again to Canada, and Australia next year. The international extension is based on two variables; the ease of securing the music licenses, and the database of songs we provide. The US was surprisingly similar for 1928—1963 songs, though we added some new sing-along titles to the app for the US.
What are Memory Track’s key objectives for the coming few years?
The Memory Tracks business changed during the pandemic. We could no longer enter care homes to train or introduce music services, so we decided to broaden our range of services and products. We became a third-party development house, and alongside our own products, this remains the strategy.
In 2021 we project managed the development of an app in Canada called musiccare CONNECT. We are currently developing a Cognitive Stimulation Therapy app in the UK in partnership with Memory Matters CIC, and with funding from the UK Government.
We are finalising the development of an app to support people living with ADD/ADHD and other neurodivergent issues called LifeTracks. Built on the same principles as Memory Tracks this extends our reach and opportunity. LifeTracks has a much larger catalogue of 2080 songs, the top 40 from 1968 to 2018.
Where can readers find out more about you?
https://linktr.ee/memorytracks
https://linktr.ee/mylifetracks
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