#TakeFiveWith Owen McNeir
Could you tell us about yourself and your job role? And one hobby/fun fact?
I am the co-founder and CEO of Remarkable Lives. The main focus of my work is business development, user testing with our audiences, developing relationships with health and care organisations, advocating for Remarkable Lives, and speaking at conferences. My priority is to get the message out about what we do and why it is of value to older people and their families, carers and everyone who might be associated with the journey through later life.
My fun fact is that I’m training to be a yoga teacher. I don’t necessarily want to become a practising yoga teacher, but I want to deepen my practice, understanding and appreciation for yoga. I find it to be the only place in my life that I can properly take some time for myself. It helps me step away from work and retreat to a meditative place.
What is a typical day like for you?
I regularly check in with my co-founder. We both work remotely from each other so we don’t have an office. Our office is email, phones and Slack. We update each other, talk about how the product is developing and address issues, prioritising reports and feedback from users.
We’ll also check in on the marketing side of the business by looking at how much engagement we have on social media, while also discussing the conversations I have been having with our public users and healthcare partners. I try to limit the time I spend on social media so it doesn’t take up all my life.
As of writing I have just come back from Malaysia, where I have been speaking at the Alzheimer’s Disease International Asia Pacific Conference. There was a lot of preparation in the build-up to the event and we launched our new app live at the conference, switching on the app in a number of countries. No pressure! The launch included a lot of planning, including business development, audience engagement work, advocacy for Remarkable Lives and interviews with the press. Trying to compartmentalise the diary to enable all of those activities took some effort and a lot of time but next week will be totally different again because at the time of writing, we’ll be going to France and releasing a new version of our app in French. We’re working on an EU funded Interreg programme to carry out user-testing of our Remarkable Lives care app that’s currently in development with care homes in Northern France.
We’re looking forward to developing the app in France where, increasingly, they’re taking the benefits of reminiscence seriously; it’s all about using recorded life stories and photographs posted on people’s timelines on the Remarkable Lives app to enhance person-centred care.
We have to work quite flexibly because as a business we have to respond to lots of enquiries, and we also have to be proactive in looking for investment and funding opportunities to help us grow. All the work that we do is off our own back and in order to do that we have to use our skills in other areas to earn money, which then feeds the development of the app.
Could you tell us how you got into your role?
The app was my idea so I suppose I became CEO by default. I started the business in 2015 for two reasons, one personal and one professional.
On a personal level I was at my grandfather’s funeral and while listening to the eulogy, I heard all these things about him that I just didn’t know and I thought that was a real shame. He lived to be ninety-four - a really long life. If I had known some of the things he had done in his life, which were really interesting and remarkable to me, it would have been a great way to bond with him and would have brought a lot of value to his later life, particularly his end of life. It would have been a place for us to engage and connect as opposed to endlessly talking about illness, diet or things like that – it would have been something really positive. I felt there were so many questions I could have asked him, so much to learn about – not just about him, but about my own identity. That’s part of the motivation behind Remarkable Lives and why I wanted to create a way of recording people’s memories and saving them.
On a professional level, I got the idea for the Remarkable Lives app while I was working as a fundraising consultant in care charities. I was trying to help one care charity articulate its story and help it engage better with the community, with the families of residents, and with its own staff. I was trying to figure out what was special about them and then I happened to find myself in this room with three of their residents, got chatting to them and they took me on a fascinating journey back in time through their own remarkable lives. The more residents I met and spoke with, the more I realised everyone’s life is remarkable in some way.
I spent a good couple of years immersing myself in this world and listening to these stories and recording them, helping families piece together the jigsaws of their relatives’ lives and helping the carers to have a better understanding of the people in their care.
That led to me thinking about the problem I’m trying to solve: that there’s a lot of disconnection and ageism in our society, which stops us from building empathy with older people, especially those in our care and particularly people who can’t tell their story or articulate how they feel or why they’re behaving in a certain way. For example, people living with dementia or Alzheimer’s, or people who have had a stroke or Parkinson’s may struggle to communicate their wants and needs. I want to empower them by getting their voice heard and, by putting them at the centre of their narrative by means of something accessible and inherently relevant, like their lived experience, encourages a circle of person-centred care to be formed around them. This, I think, is how we help to ensure people aren’t ignored and how an older person, no matter how compromised medically, can be present in their care.
I realise that when I am in a hospital, care home or hospice, I am looking at all the information the carer has. They have all this information, everything from your medical records, but there’s no equivalent record of who you are. This is what led me to find my co-founder and CTO Warren. His grandfather who lives in America has had the most incredible life; he was the manager of a famous African American country singer who performed for presidents. Warren’s grandfather now has dementia and his family are just rushing to try and save and collect all these memories before it’s too late, so this got me thinking that we need to send people – families, young people - on a quest to save memories. That’s when I thought: ‘let’s use technology to facilitate this’.
The Remarkable Lives app is deliberately designed in a way that is familiar to people that use social media and has social networking capabilities, for example you can privately connect with people and share life stories. Some users have asked ‘how does this benefit me?’ and this is a mindset we as a company are trying to shift and we’re trying to make it easier for people to understand why they should do this. The app asks users to create a profile and a timeline for someone else, not just for them. Social Media websites such as Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat ask you to record your life, but Remarkable Lives is about telling someone else’s story and connecting with your family in a different way: less selfie, more selfless.
I’m occasionally asked why people should use the Remarkable Lives app instead of social media sites like Instagram. On a purely functional level, it’s simple: because you can’t backdate posts on those platforms. For example, if you have a photograph of your parents’ wedding in 1942, you could stick that on Instagram but you can’t give that a date – it would just sit on a random timeline, surrounded by the noise of your own life. The Remarkable Lives app allows you to create a timeline just for your parents, which allows you to create what is effectively a family tree or digital scrapbook with your parents at the centre of it.
What motivates you to do a good job?
I spent a lot of time in care settings with older people, watching how they are treated and how they are often ignored. It’s an example of the disconnection and ageism I talked about in society and it doesn’t help that carers are so rushed off their feet. We’re also preoccupied with our own lives, so we kind of switch off thoughts about later life.
In trying to do something that will benefit older people today, I’m doing it for my own later life because something has to happen in the way that we perceive later life and the way that we look after people living with dementia and Alzheimer’s.
One in four of us will be over sixty-five in 2040. 2040 sounds like a long time but it’s twenty-one years away, so it’s really not that far off. And only twenty-five years after that in 2065, it’s projected one in three of us will be sixty-five. We have an ageing population around the world so we have to do something to reconnect because these statistics apply to us, I’m in my early forties and I’ll be in my seventies in 2050. So I want to be in a situation where the next person who comes into a room where I might be being cared for, will have a chance of knowing something about me and will therefore be able to identify or empathise with me in some way and so be able to communicate with me. I would like the app to be able to help someone give me confidence and self-esteem in what may be a difficult and challenging time in my life.
We have to think of things that we can bring to our care and our health that will help prevent the negativity and the stigma which is attached to later life because if you don’t address those things now, then we will see the challenges of later life just getting worse, not least issues around loneliness and isolation. The economic burden of our health and social care services will become much more acute if we don’t think of things that can be integrated into our life now; technology can be a really good way of achieving that because it can facilitate human interaction. The Remarkable Lives app in particular encourages you to enable the people around you to engage with you through your story.
How do you learn at work?
I didn’t come from the Health and Care industry or a Tech background, so I am learning every day. I do that by listening to the people around me, the people who have the knowledge and the expertise. I spend a lot of time really absorbing and concentrating on trying to learn from those other people and work out how I apply it to the way I run Remarkable Lives.
I constantly seek people out, for example I listen to people who are very experienced in Health and Care, my co-founder with his great knowledge and skill in technology and our users who give us feedback.
At the beginning of my journey I thought I was going to find the solution myself, but you find that you quickly fall over when you try to do it all by yourself. Determination and conviction are important qualities to have, but not at the expense of ignoring other’s expertise and what people need. You really have to listen to the people whose lives you are trying to improve and that’s why user and assumption testing are so important. I started this idea in 2015 and I’d say we are still quite early in our journey; we have some great technologies and IP, but we’re not integrated into the health system and we haven’t got millions of people downloading and using our app – yet! We’ll only reach a level of success if we give people what they want.
What are your aims for the next year? For example, if you work in accessibility do you have any plans to help make workplaces more inclusive? If you work in Learning and Development how are you going to promote workplace learning?
For the next twelve months our goal is to refine the user experience for the Remarkable Lives app. Everyone can download the app for free in the app stores now, so we want to encourage people to give it a go and, importantly, give us their feedback. We want to get the message across that here is a tool you can use to record all these memories, save them and enjoy doing that by connecting with each other.
On the care side of things with our care app, we need to bring that to market and will be spending the next 12 months working with trial partners on refining the apps and getting a group of early adopters. It’s going to be a global enterprise so we have care organisations in India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, France and Malta who will be trial partners, as well as in the UK. They’ll be using the care app to help with training, communication with families and to improve their care so that it’s more person-centred.
Funding is also going to be a big focus for us to achieve sustainability as a company; we would very much like to secure this through partnerships, sales and subscribers to the care app.
YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT REMARKABLE LIVES ON THE FOLLOWING PLATFORMS:
Remarkable Lives website: www.remarkablelives.co.uk
Remarkable Lives Twitter Account: @RemarkableAge
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