Zinnia’s Smart Take on Slow TV Brings Comfort to People with Dementia and Their Caregivers
Allyson Schrier has combined her experience as an Alzheimer’s caregiver with her career in tech to solve a persistent problem for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their overextended caregivers. Her research-backed take on “therapeutic TV” has won the company an enthusiastic initial user base, and their team is poised to scale.
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Origin Story
Like so many innovations in healthcare, and especially in the world of dementia, Zinnia was born out of personal experience. In this case it began when Allyson Schrier’s husband was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia at the age of 47.
“It’s a particularly nasty form of dementia because it generally results in a wholesale personality change,” says Allyson. “People lose their executive functioning and things like empathy can go out the window. He had been just the sweetest guy, and yet as the disease progressed he would become completely enraged because he could no longer button his shirt or listen to music.”
His condition progressed to the point where Schrier had to move him into a long-term care facility. That’s when her eyes were opened to a new problem in dementia care, one that was making life harder for both patients and caregivers in an already stressful situation.
The Challenge
What Schrier discovered was that it was common practice to park people with cognitive decline in front of a television for hours on end, with the assumption that it was a way to entertain, distract, or pacify them. From the very start, Schrier knew that the opposite was in fact true, and that something needed to change.
“Early on in the disease my husband was able to say he didn’t want to watch something or simply leave the room, but as his dementia grew worse he became trapped in front of the television. I would show up and he would either be agitated about what he was watching, or he’d seem lost.”
The television was not only causing more agitation, thought Schrier, but it was a huge missed opportunity for something positive. That’s when the wheels started turning on an idea. What if she could create a new kind of video content, something specifically designed to help folks suffering from dementia, while also easing the burden on their caregivers?
The DIY Days
Schrier went into research mode. She read the available research (there wasn’t much) and immersed herself in the world of Alzheimer’s caregiving. She even got certified to train Alzheimer’s caregivers. What she learned was that the best video content for this patient population had a few important characteristics: it was slow paced, low on plot, and had no confusion between fact and fiction.
Using these simple parameters, Schrier started DIYing content for her husband using her iPad and iPhone. At first they were simple videos about their children and their vacations. But they worked. So much so that she began asking herself some bigger questions. How could she improve the quality of the videos and then get them into a lot more hands? Luckily, Schrier had a bit of prior experience solving big technical problems.
Before her children were born, Schrier worked as the head of technology for the Experience Music Project, a unique position that had her acting as the personal technology manager for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. What Allen dreamed up, Schrier brought to reality, and the job instilled in her the belief that with the right team, even the wildest ideas were possible.
“It's only ridiculous if you can't find the right people to build it,” says Schrier.
The first “who” that Schrier turned to was Frank Lee, an accomplished designer who’d worked at Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft. Friends introduced Schrier to Lee, and the idea resonated with him almost immediately. “Let’s do it,” he told her.
Lee turned around and recruited Bill Uniowski to the cause. Uniowski was an experienced media tech executive who’d lost two grandparents to dementia. He heard Schrier’s story and was hooked. A talented visual artist and filmmaker, Berenice Freedome, rounded out the initial team.
For four years the four labored on Zinnia as a side passion project, meeting once a week to develop and improve their content. Schrier would visit homes and facilities where people were caring for people with Alzheimer’s. She’d show them the videos they were developing and watch how people responded – and then iterate and iterate again.
The Inflection Point
The COVID lock-downs in 2020 shut down Schrier’s patient visits but ended up giving the project an unexpected shot in the arm. The team decided to throw their content on a website for free in the hopes that people would find value and share some feedback. The response was powerful.
“What we started discovering from the feedback was that these videos had a therapeutic potential that we hadn’t fully appreciated,” says Schrier. She and her team decided to conduct a two-year research project at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital where they tested Zinnia in long-term and acute-care settings. Among other things, they discovered that Zinnia videos had the potential to decrease the over-reliance on antipsychotic drugs within dementia care facilities.
“Antipsychotics are not meant to be used for people with dementia, yet they're used all the time because it’s a quick fix and calms people down,” says Schrier. “We have had people reach out and share amazing stories about how Zinnia videos were able to calm patients down who’d previously relied on drugs. So much so that their care plan was changed, with Zinnia added as a first course of action. The researchers at UBC found the same thing.”
Zinnia’s next inflection point came when they were chosen for the Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator in January 2023.
“We believed in our content, but until we were chosen for Techstars, I’m not sure we believed in ourselves as a company,” says Uniowski.
Under the Hood
With a product as seemingly simple as Zinnia, the details are everything. That’s where chief designer Frank Lee and Chief Creative Officer Berenice Freedome come in. Lee makes the user experience seamless while Freedome makes sure every video is aesthetically pleasing and tells a compelling – if simple – story.
Zinnia’s videos range from topical videos that engage the mind – while remaining slow paced and clear – to calming videos of pets and nature, to “activity of daily living” videos that encourage positive actions in patients, like drinking water or using the bathroom. The team painstakingly plans every detail from color to sound to image speed. The Zinnia team has made their videos available on a broad array of devices, including streaming platforms like Roku.
Our Take
There are a lot of reasons we’re excited to have Allyson Schrier, Bill Uniowski, and the Zinnia team in StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot. First, Schrier is exactly the kind of founder we look for to join the Health Transformer community. She’s got amazing technical experience and she has a fire to change the status quo. Her positive energy and attitude in the face of this devastating disease are infectious. She’s also attracted an all-star team to take the project to the next level.
We’re also bullish on Zinnia because it’s aimed at helping patients and caregivers alike. Schrier’s experience with her husband gave her a deep passion for dementia family caregivers, who bear such a heavy emotional load that they’re said to be six times more likely to get dementia themselves. Recently the Zinnia team did a survey of caregivers who were subscribed to their platform and 80% said that the videos reduced their own stress.
Schrier and her team are bringing moments of peace and little nuggets of joy into very stressful and strained situations, and that’s a beautiful thing. With their clinical research and the amazing team they’ve formed, we think Zinnia is poised to scale and have an even greater impact.
Join us in welcoming Allyson Schrier, Bill Uniowski, and the Zinnia team to StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with Zinnia via email
Call for Alzheimer’s Innovation
With support from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Gates Ventures, we’ve launched a new global initiative created to develop a collaborative innovation community alongside leading companies, research teams, and stakeholders with a mission to accelerate progress in prevention, diagnosis, and management of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Learn more and apply for an Alzheimer’s Moonshot Fellowship.
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Published: Jun 26, 2024