Caregivers at getting a glimpse into the world of dementia through the Virtual Dementia Tour, which simulates some of the struggles of living with dementia.

Arden Courts of Kenwood, an Alzheimer’s assisted living facility recently offered the Virtual Dementia Tour, which allows people to experience the effects of aging when combined with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia, said marketing director Katie Moreno. Simple, ordinary tasks become even more challenging when a person is dealing with memory loss.

St. Leonard, a retirement community in Centerville, also will use the tour to train staff.

“I think it’s very important that we go out of our way to make sure our staff gets dementia training, and part of dementia training is understanding that the person’s brain is changing,” said Becky White, staff development manager at St. Leonard.

Direct caregivers will take the tour first, but she plans to offer it to everyone from the maintenance staff to food service workers.

“I think it’s something that would be very useful for anyone working here to understand what our residents go through,” White said.

The tour

Before the tour at Arden Courts, the participants’ physical and sensory abilities were altered.

They put on rubber gloves containing split peas in the fingertips

That simulates neuropathy or the disconnect between what a person wants to do with his hands and what his hands do. Two fingers on each hand were taped together to give people the idea of the challenges of completing tasks with arthritic fingers.

Participants wore goggles that simulated vision loss brought on by macular degeneration. Ear buds were placed in each participant’s ear and an iPod shuffle was clipped to their shirt.

“This is just background noise, confusing noise,” Moreno explained. “People who have dementia can’t filter out background noise like we can.”

Each participant went alone into a darkened room where five stations were set up for completing tasks.

Marty Dickmann, 66, of Sycamore Twp., came to take the tour because her 95-year-old father has mild dementia and is in an assisted living memory care unit at another facility.

“I’m with him every day, but I still don’t comprehend, totally, what’s going through his mind. It comes and goes,” Dickmann said. “I’m enough like my father that I sense some of what’s he’s going through.”

Chelsea Groh, a program services assistant, told Dickmann that she’d be asked to complete five tasks. A list of tasks was posted in the room if she forgot them. Dickmann was told she wouldn’t receive any additional information, nor would she be able to ask questions during the tour.

Groh then read the five tasks that Dickmann needed to complete in three minutes. The tasks ranged from putting a belt through belt loops on a pair of pants to clearing the dinner table.

Dickmann’s search for the belt was unsuccessful, so she sat down at another station where she started the next task of drawing a picture of her family members and writing their names on them.

Before Dickmann finished that task her time was up.

“It’s supposed to be difficult,” Moreno said. “It’s not supposed to be easy. The average number of tasks that people complete is about 2½.”

Moreno asked her how she felt during the process.

“To not even be able to find a belt,” Dickmann said, shaking her head. “There is one there, but I didn’t see it. I saw the ties, but I didn’t see the belt. And they did tell me there was supposed to be trousers there, but I didn’t even see the trousers.”

Even hearing a list of the five tasks was meant to simulate how difficult it is for people with dementia to remember multiple commands.

“The main thing is to be compassionate,” Moreno told Dickmann. “Be simple. Don’t say, ‘Get your coat, grab your walker and let’s go to the front door,’ because you’ve lost them at ‘let’s.’ You need to have ample time in between if you ask him to do something, because it’s going to take him a longer time to hear what you’re saying and for it to actually compute to his brain.”

For Dickmann, the tour reinforced how she interacts with her father.

“The main thing is to just be totally patient, and I’m pretty patient already,” she said. “I think I give very simple directions. He does much better with a simple step direction than he does with, ‘Do you want this or that?’’’

Besides offering the tour periodically on site, Arden Courts has taken the program to a local Alzheimer’s symposium, a caregivers’ conference, hospitals, churches, home health companies, assisted living communities and skilled nursing centers.