{"id":174,"date":"2015-09-28T10:21:29","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T10:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/demo.themegrill.com\/fitclub\/?page_id=23"},"modified":"2021-01-10T20:30:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T20:30:12","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/consciousmetrics.com\/","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Conscious Metrics was started in November 2019 when I unexpectedly became the caregiver for Clark, one of my best friends from childhood. We are nearly the same age, have similar interests in music and math – and yet the form of early-onset dementia Clark experiences produces severe amnesia of memories past and present.<\/span><\/p>

The circumstances were less than ideal: the hospital called to explain that, as ‘activated health proxy’ it was my responsibility to establish long-term care… I discussed with my wife if we should take him home? The short answer: yes.<\/span><\/p>

As empty-nesters (pre-covid) – this seemed a reasonable way to provide Clark with a stable place to live while his medical team attempted to diagnose his condition. Clark’s form of dementia is an autoimmune-based traumatic brain injury, along with non-progressing dementia and amnesia… in other words – this was going to be a serious challenge.<\/span><\/p>

Professionally I had recently changed focus to Program and Project Management, passed the PMP exam and received my certificate – and intended to take some time off to document best practices in product development based on previous work. The end goal was (and continues to be) an ‘open science’ project to improve tools and techniques; with examples and open discussions to iterate on ideas…<\/span><\/p>

My project, named bespoke agile<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0 was put on hold as my wife and I (and now several college-age kids home from school due to covid) learned how to support someone who simply forgets about covid-driven protocols, and who sometimes does not know where he is, and why he is living with us.<\/span><\/p>

Being a process-focused person – I noticed that the most progress made with Clark took place during periods of greater lucidity; when a set of memories was in place that was more coherent with the rest of the world. Contrary to my expectations, assessing Clark’s ‘level of consciousness’ and lucidity was far more challenging that we expected.<\/span><\/p>

Greater challenges are greater gifts.. and in this case – I decided to science it out, hoping my experiences in music, technology, 3d imaging, Machine Learning, and raising three very different children might be relevant…\u00a0<\/span>Machine Learning is now accessible on my machines and in the cloud, and so the next step was to identify metrics and tools to build data sets:<\/span><\/p>