From GrandForksHerald.com: Valley City State University — “Wearing yellowed goggles and bumpy gloves, Danae Knapper tries to complete five household tasks, but she canโt remember the fifth one.ย Image: Carrie Snyder / The Forum
Confused, the 21-year-old Valley City State University junior wanders around the bedroom of an apartment on the first floor of McCoy Hall trying to remember what it was.ย โOh man, I know I was supposed to do some other stuff,โ she says after stuffing a pillow into a blue pillowcase.ย Knapper is one of about 40 students who have participated in Katie Woehlโs dementia simulation lab as part of the professorโs 300-level abnormal psychology class.ย A geriatric specialist developed the lab, called the Virtual Dementia Tour and distributed by nonprofit Second Wind Dreams, to give people an idea of what itโs like to live with the disease and other symptoms common in older patients.
The goggles imitate yellowing of the eyes and macular degeneration; the gloves mimic tingling and numbness in the hands. An iPod plays a continual โconfusion trackโ that sounds like an out-of-tune talk-radio station. Shoe inserts simulate nerve pain, corns and bunions.
The experience made Knapper, a transfer student and human services major, think of her great-grandmother with dementia.ย โI wish I wouldโve done this three years ago, when she couldnโt figure out what you were saying or she couldnโt remember what you just said. It would have probably given me a little more patience with her,โ she said.ย โIt kind of gave me a new perspective on what they experience every day, and we only did it for 10 minutes,โ said a social science education major.
Although everyone handles the experience differently, Woehlโs students tend to exhibit similar behaviors. They talk to themselves, laugh nervously, wander around and complete tasks they werenโt asked to do.”
This very much reminds me of the “Hearing Voices” Simulations run at the Clinical Simulation Center of Las Vegas — which allowed nursing students to experience schizophrenia!
