The Wayback: A virtual reality film series for people living with dementia.

The Wayback is creativity meeting technology for good. By marrying creative storytelling, emerging technology and personal experience, The Wayback has become one of the most unique complementary therapies available for people living with Dementia.

This session will deep dive into how a universal reminiscence tool can offer a deeply personal experience through attention to creativity and a person-first approach, with results that have brought it to the attention of the world renowned Alzheimer’s Society and the wider healthcare industry as it seeks to become a viable business. It will highlight the importance of authenticity and detail when creating an immersive experience and how to best integrate creativity and storytelling into product development whilst understanding the medical perspective.

Questions our presentation intends to answer: 

1. Why is it important to focus on wellness as a measure of success?
2. Why creative detail and craft are so important when creating an immersive experience for patients
3. How to design experiences that use future-facing technology for older patients.

The Wayback will demonstrate the huge importance of creativity when developing new approaches to health and wellbeing products and services. It will highlight the importance of knowing your audiences – not just those living with the condition but those around them: in this case, those living with dementia, their carer’s and families. Finally, it will remind and inspire us how following a gut creative instinct can lead to a breakthrough product and innovative, impactful and scalable business.

The Wayback was born from a creative instinct to address a need we felt wasn’t being met. We will tell the story of how it went from an idea no client or charity was prepared to take a risk on, to crowdfunding a prototype that made the world of dementia care sit up and take notice. It will highlight the importance of doing something you believe in with a passion while always keeping creativity and integrity at the heart of the product. Our session will show how immersive storytelling is at its best when used to create an emotional reaction and addresses a direct need.

The Wayback is a brilliant start-up example of scalable creativity that can be applied across a universal market. Now more than ever, with the ageing global population growing faster than ever, we need to find innovative ways of managing the conditions that come with age, such as dementia. We need to find drug-free complementary therapies that have wellness and care at their heart – and are able to be used by everybody. The story behind The Wayback, and seeing it making a difference to the millions living with dementia, can inspire everybody at CogX and beyond.

Access your complimentary pass to join UKAEG at Createch@CogX by using the code CREATECHTOPIC.