My name is Alan, and I'm the designer of Frank's Board.
But Frank's Board wasn't actually my idea.
It was my wife Hellen's.
Frank is Hellen's dad and my father-in-law. His wife, Teresa, was Hellen's mum and my mother-in-law, who we sadly lost recently.
Frank is still living at home, and Hellen had been thinking about a very simple problem: how could we make it easier for her dad to know what day it was, what was happening that day and what the family wanted him to know?
Her idea was beautifully simple.
What if there was just a screen?
Something that sat in Frank's home and quietly gave him the information he needed.
No app for Frank to open. No login. No menus. No buttons to press. Nothing new for him to learn.
Hellen shared the idea with me and I could immediately see how it could work.
So I designed and built it for her dad.
We called it Frank's Board.
The family manages everything remotely from our own phones, tablets or computers. Frank simply sees his Board at home, showing the day, date and time, what's happening today and tomorrow, and messages from us. Our photographs can appear beside those messages so he can immediately see who they're from.
Then came the bit that really mattered.
Frank started using it.
It worked for him.
And particularly since losing Teresa, anything that can help Frank remain confident, connected and independent in his own home matters enormously to our family.
That's when Hellen and I started thinking that perhaps we shouldn't keep this to ourselves.
There must be other families trying to solve exactly the same sort of problem. Maybe something created for Hellen's dad could help somebody else's dad, mum, husband, wife, grandparent, relative or friend.
So we decided to share it.
Frank's Board wasn't conceived as a business. It exists because Hellen had an idea to help her dad and I was fortunate enough to be able to turn that idea into something he could actually use.
It's free to use and we intend to keep it that way.
We don't think of it simply as a dementia product either. There are many reasons somebody might benefit from a little help keeping track of their day.
The idea underneath it is much broader:
Technology should adapt to the person, rather than expecting the person to adapt to the technology.
And Hellen came up with the phrase that has become the principle behind everything we've done with Frank's Board:
Support, not control.
That's where Frank's Board came from.
One daughter trying to help her dad.
And a simple idea that turned out to work.
Built for Frank. Made for everyone.
