“What do I do to keep them engaged?”
If you’re caring for someone with dementia, you’ve probably asked yourself that. And you may have noticed that the activities you have don’t quite meet your loved one where they are.
I recently sat down with Ju Tu, the founder of Aegeliss, a company that makes signs, labels and puzzles for people living with cognitive impairment. Her products are beautiful. But what stood out to me is that they’re built on how the brain of someone with dementia actually works.
And the ideas behind them are ones you can start using today, with a piece of paper and a few markers.
What I love about this approach is that it helps explain why some dementia activities don’t work. Sometimes the activity doesn’t match what the person can still do. Sometimes they don’t understand how to get started. And sometimes they simply don’t want to be told what to do. Changing how we offer an activity can make a difference.
Why Ju Started Making These
Ju’s story starts with her grandparents.
Her grandfather had been a people leader his whole career and a vibrant performer in retirement. When he developed cognitive impairment, her grandmother cared for him. She was healthy. And the stress of caregiving put her in the hospital.
Seeing that up close gave Ju a deep understanding of what caregivers carry, day in and day out. She went on to work with the Center for Applied Research in Dementia, learning how the brain works and how to build Montessori-inspired design into tools that support independence, joy and connection in everyday care. She also spent about a year volunteering at Elderwise, an adult day center in Seattle, watching how people with dementia actually use what’s around them.
What Montessori Means in Dementia Care
Most of us hear “Montessori” and picture a preschool. Things are clearly labeled. Children are encouraged to explore activities on their own.
Ju explained what’s underneath that. The child has a sense of agency. Each activity can be adjusted from easy to hard. There’s a variety of things to choose from, and there’s never a set schedule to follow.
Bring that into dementia care, and the question becomes: how can we give the person a sense of agency and purpose in their day?
As Ju put it, many people living with dementia carry a whole life of wisdom. From their careers. From family duties. From the military. Now the brain changes may limit what they can do. So the goal is to let them feel fulfilled doing things adapted to the abilities they still have.
That’s the idea behind Montessori activities for dementia: giving the person opportunities to make choices, take part in meaningful activities, and use the abilities they still have.
Why Losing Agency Can Show Up as “Behaviors”
This is the part I love.
I think one of the main reasons people with dementia show behaviors like agitation, yelling and frustration, even what gets described as combativeness or defiance, is this loss of agency.
Think about it. Here’s someone who has been independent their whole life. Now they have this condition, and slowly but surely, everything is being taken away.
And sometimes, not all the time, we try to get them to do the one thing we picked. But not everybody wants to fold towels. Not everybody wants to play bingo.
The Montessori approach flips that. Instead of one activity, there’s a range of things they can do at whatever ability level they’re at. We meet them where they are, and that gives back a sense of agency.
How to Make a Home Easier to Understand With Dementia
Ju looks at the problem this way.
Caregiving is hard. Underneath that, the first and biggest reason is that the person can no longer do daily routines or make decisions safely and independently. So the caregiver steps in and does more, and more, and more, on top of the million other things they’re already handling.
And where does the person spend most of their day? Usually at home.
It’s a reminder of how much we take for granted when our brains are working all right. We know where the plates are. The cups. The silverware. Where we keep the extra towels. But for someone who has lived in the same home for decades, as dementia progresses, that home can become a strange place. It gets hard to know where anything is.
Even when someone still has the physical ability to move around the house, or to read, they can lose their understanding of the space itself.
Ju calls the answer a cognitively accessible home: one your loved one can move through with clarity and confidence, so they can start some daily routines on their own. Getting a plate and utensils. Helping wash the dishes. Putting them back in the same place.
If your loved one can do that, it’s already taken a lot of stress off of you.
Signs on the doors
Ju asked me to picture a long hallway with five identical white doors. Of course someone would get confused.
A sign on each door tells the person what the room is for, without them having to feel embarrassed. They can just go into their bedroom. Go into the bathroom. Ju’s room signs also come with arrow stickers to point the way to a room.
Labels on cabinets, drawers and closets
Now picture a typical American kitchen. Cabinet doors, drawers, cupboards everywhere. For someone with memory loss, remembering what’s behind each one is really hard.
Labels can name what’s inside: plates, bowls, utensils, snacks, cereal, rice. In the closet: undergarments, socks, jackets, pants.
Step-by-step labels for daily routines
Ju also breaks routines into steps. What are the steps of brushing your teeth? Of running the washer and dryer? Of folding laundry?
For a lot of people aging in place, someone may not be living with them every day. Labels like these can let them do things on their own, and they make it safer.
Dementia affects physical abilities as well as cognitive ones. But for someone who still has a lot of their physical abilities, signs and labels help with the cognitive piece, so they can hold on to their independence. You could try putting some signs up right now and see if it helps.
What Makes a Dementia-Friendly Puzzle Different
I’ve seen dementia puzzles before, but Ju’s had features I’d never seen. So I asked her about the thinking behind the design.
She’d been to a lot of senior living communities and watched how people used the puzzles already out there. She landed on three features that matter.
The picture stays in view. Having a reference image makes a huge difference. Ju noticed that even adults competing in a world puzzle championship keep the picture right in front of them. With a traditional puzzle, the pieces sit in a box, and the cover is crowded with a brand name and a glossy finish. That makes the image hard to see, especially for someone who may have vision problems. A clear picture at a comfortable angle, with no glare, helps the person stay focused. (Dementia can change how the brain processes what the eyes see, which I go through in how dementia changes vision.)
It’s made for adults. A lot of older adults don’t want toddler-like things around them. Images that preserve dignity and fit an adult matter.
It sets up in seconds. The first time Ju brought a puzzle to her grandma, she realized she’d have to explain how to set it up for her grandpa. Getting the box from the closet, setting it up on the table, explaining it to him, and he may or may not even want it:
“That’s already like a 10-minute process for her, and the end result might be a frustrated grandma.”
So Ju designed hers to live on the table, ready to go, and to set up in seconds.
None of these ideas are things we haven’t heard before. We’ve all heard puzzles are great. What Ju did is take that and build it around how dementia works. At eye level. With as few hiccups as possible. As smooth as possible for them.
Try This at Home: A Simple Table Sign
Then I asked Ju the question you’re probably asking. What if you don’t have any of her products? How can you make your home more cognitively accessible, or bring more Montessori-style activities in, right now?
Her answer was a table tent: a sign folded so it stands up on its own.
On one side, write the invitation, with a picture. “Please help sort socks.” “Please enjoy the puzzle.” “Please drink some water.” Ju’s rule is that every sign comes with an icon, so it’s understood at a glance.
On the other side, list the steps. Ju was clear about this:
“Never take it for granted that they will understand.”
Don’t assume the socks in front of them mean they’re supposed to fold them, or that a puzzle on the table means they’ll know how to start it. Write out the steps, each with its own picture, so your loved one can follow along without feeling embarrassed.
Ju has seen this work in memory care, where staff usually rely on verbal prompting: “Hey, come do this. This is how you do it.” A sign takes the place of that prompting, which is easier on the caregiver. And for the person, it comes back to agency. Ju described it from their side:
“I don’t need to ask for permission. I don’t need to be helped by someone. I can read this. If I can no longer read, I can understand the icon.”
They can start the activity on their own terms. That’s what makes engagement meaningful.
If letting your loved one help ever makes your own day harder, I wrote about that side of it in when letting someone with dementia help makes things harder.
Why an offer works better than an ask
I also love the idea of a sign that just sits there. Put “Please enjoy a puzzle” on the dining room table with a puzzle, and it becomes a visual cue to sit down.
Sometimes it’s the directness. “Here’s a puzzle. Do a puzzle now.” Or, “Do you want to do a puzzle?” It’s so easy for them to default to, “No, I don’t want to.”
But when it’s just there as an offer, with a sign to cue it, they might think, “Okay, maybe I will.” It isn’t coming directly from you, at a time when they may already be struggling with their sense of independence.
It can feel like their own idea.
And you don’t need anything special to make one. No special printer. No special equipment. A piece of paper and some markers. Ju suggests adding a little color along the top and bottom so it stands out from everything around it.
Where you put it matters
Don’t give up if it doesn’t seem to stick the first time. Where the sign is, and how it’s presented, can make a big shift in how your loved one receives it.
Ju told me about activity directors in a few memory care communities who set a sign and a puzzle out in a high-traffic area. Residents came up to it on their own, explored it, and started working on it, by themselves or with each other. One director was so surprised. She had never seen that before.
So keep it at eye level. And adjust the height or the spot to fit your loved one’s mobility and where their eyes naturally land.
Signs Can Move With Them
Ju makes her signs to last, so they can travel with the person.
That matters if your loved one moves from home into assisted living or memory care, or ends up in the hospital. You can take the signs that make sense and bring them along, so there’s something familiar in a place that isn’t.
What Ju Has Seen
Ju’s grandfather is still living, and she FaceTimes with him every week or two. He loves the puzzle. Her first labels are only in English, but he understands them because of the icons.
“Now seeing him just effortlessly, you know, go into the kitchen and do his things on his own… is really fulfilling for me.”
One moment from her work stays with her. She asked a wife for a testimonial. Instead, her husband, who is living with mid-stage dementia, wrote Ju a long email himself, thanking her for letting him help his wife in the kitchen again.
From her year at Elderwise, Ju came away seeing how much creativity people with dementia still have. They can still contribute in meaningful ways when the opportunity is offered, with the right cues around them, the right way of speaking to them, and the right visual support.
Why I Wanted to Share This
If you’ve been watching my channel for a while, you know I don’t talk about products much. This isn’t an ad. Ju didn’t pay me to have her on.
We met in person at the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration conference in Seattle. She told me about what she was building, and I thought, this is a beautiful story. It comes from an immense need. It’s informed by an understanding of how dementia affects the brain. And it happens to be very beautifully made.
If you’d like to see Ju’s signs, labels and puzzles, you can find them at Aegeliss. She spells it A-E-G-E-L-I-S-S, on purpose. She wanted aging to feel like it can take more than one form.
There’s a Careblazers code, too: Lovecareblazers takes 10% off your first three orders. Take a look at Aegeliss here.
Start With One Sign
You don’t need to buy anything to begin. A piece of paper, a few markers, a picture, and the steps on the back. Set it at eye level somewhere your loved one walks past.
Then let it be their idea.
If you’re struggling to find activities that work for your loved one, this is exactly the kind of thing we think through together inside the Care Collective: how to keep your loved one engaged without it all landing on you, what to try when an activity gets a “no,” and how to take care of yourself while you’re caring for them. You can learn more here.
