Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease that has touched the lives of millions of people around the world. Anyone who has had a family member afflicted with the disease never looks at it in the same way again. But not everyone has had to experience the anxiety, pain, and frustration that comes with Alzheimer’s, and one advocacy group has developed a Facebook app to raise awareness.
It’s called Sort Me Out, and is a product of the Alzheimer’s Disease Association Singapore. Once you’ve allowed the app access to your Facebook data, it uses it to create a fake profile page that closely resembles your real page. Slowly, the app begins to remove all of your Facebook data – your friends, posts, activities, and likes.
The app feigns notifications that your photos and friends are all being deleted. Obviously, the goal of the app is to mimic the helpless feeling that an Alzheimer’s patient has – powerless to stop their memories being erased. Of course, no Facebook app is going to be able to truly recreate that feeling, but the app does a pretty good job.
And the whole point is to raise awareness and spread it via social media. At the end of the experience, users are given the message “losing your precious memories and identity is painful; and that’s what people with dementia experience.” There, you can share the app with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.
Interactive Facebook apps like this can serve a variety of purposes – to scare, to make you laugh, to inform. This one uses the concept of Facebook data to engender a feeling of loss. Have you tried it? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
[Hat Tip CNET Asia]