What started as a way to keep houseplants alive in a William & Mary dorm room over winter break slowly grew into a way to support people living with dementia, its creators say.
Their invention, MindBot, is a semi-autonomous countertop greenhouse now in use at the Williamsburg Landing retirement community. An interdisciplinary undergraduate team of four women created it under the tutelage of professor Ran Yang, a physicist and inventor.
Three were in Yang’s department, the university’s engineering physics and applied design program, where there’s one main idea the professor tries to get across to her students.
“Make something that people want — not just a flying coffee machine,” she said. “What problem are you solving?”
A student who graduated in 2023 originally came up with the idea as a way to care for houseplants, recent graduate and team member Anna McNally said. But when McNally inherited the project and made it the subject of scholarship-supported research last summer, it put down roots as something entirely different.
People with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions that affect their ability to think, learn and remember are encouraged to stay engaged, but there’s a lack of interactive options, said recent graduate Emma Stiller, the team’s sole neuroscientist.
Stiller worked with McNally on the real secret to MindBot: a research-backed curriculum of activities that stimulates memory through all the senses from sight — with green as the color that remains detectable the longest — through the powerful properties of scent.
“I was really looking at what activities I could create that would engage certain cortical areas of the brain that are specifically used for memory, cognition and overall function,” Stiller said.
In one study, she said, people with Alzheimer’s who were provided with essential oils for 45 minutes a day for six months showed less cognitive decline than patients not given the oils.
“That is actually the first sense that Alzheimer’s patients lose, and that’s a lot of times how it’s diagnosed,” Stiller said. “If you can keep the olfactory sense functioning, then it prevents the cognitive decline.”
One of the activities the team devised involves taking cuttings from the greenhouse plants and putting them in sensory bags to smell and touch. The team selected common cooking herbs such as basil and mint, stimulating taste as well as smell, and other activities that target dexterity by caring for and touching the plants.
Gardening is often recommended as an activity, but it’s seasonal and not accessible for people with more severe memory care needs. The countertop greenhouse addresses those issues, said Emily Morris, a team member who graduated from the applied physics program this spring. Morris constructed much of the final product, including a light sensor that adjusts the intensity of the greenhouse’s light in response to ambient light in the room where it’s kept.
The three recent graduates knew each other well, having lived in the same dorm as freshmen in William & Mary’s Botetourt Complex — partial inspiration for MindBot’s name, along with “robot” and “botany.” Still, first-year international student Trinny Xu said they made it easy for her to join as the fourth team member.
Freshmen rarely have the opportunity to participate in higher-level projects, Yang said, but Xu’s prior work, which included a project to calculate a function that could predict the path of space capsule parachutes, was impressive enough to earn a spot on the team. Xu created a 3D rendering of the greenhouse design and 3D printed many of the elements used in the final iteration, team members said.
When the team presented its research at Williamsburg Landing in May as part of the facility’s “Let’s Talk Science” discussion series, it caught the eye of staff and residents, including Leslie Bowie. After coordinating care for years for her mother, who had dementia, Bowie moved into Williamsburg Landing when her husband started showing signs of neurodegeneration about seven years ago. He died in December.
Bowie, recently appointed to a four-year term with the state’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Commission, said she agrees with the design team that the activities available to individuals with memory care issues are too limited.
“Every individual living with Alzheimer’s is very different, and so there’s the need to know what they’re interested in, what they’ve been interested in in the past, what their physical limitations are. All that has to be taken into consideration in developing activities,” Bowie said. “So, I think the more options, the better for those being cared for.”
Have a health care or science story, question or concern? Contact Katrina Dix, 757-222-5155, katrina.dix@virginiamedia.com
