HALIFAX -Ann West peers hopefully at the blue, flat-panel screen, curious to see how a website might help her cope with the wide ranging and potentially frightening symptoms of her husband's Alzheimer's disease.
The DementiaGuide.ca website being presented to her by Kathryn Garden, vice president of DementiaGuide Inc., is an online health information business that helps track the disease and provides caregivers with information on how to manage it.
Once thought unlikely bets as for-profit ventures, the sites are springing up in an era when high-speed Internet access has become widespread.
West, 67, says she still is considering if the monthly subscription of $17.50 is worth it.
However, if her 68-year-old husband Fred - who has had the illness for six years - starts to show more serious symptoms like violent behaviour or repeating the same question endlessly, she'll be willing to sign on.
"The medications are fairly new and if they fail then the person goes down very fast. If that happened, I would probably be running for this, to see what was going on . . . before pressing the panic button," West says as Garden guides her through the features.
In his office at the Veteran's Memorial hospital in Halifax, Dr. Ken Rockwood - author of the 800 pages of information on the site - argues the web is the ideal method to track and provide information on the complex symptoms in dementia.
"People initially said nobody's going to go the web to get their information. They pointed to the first big busts on the electronic-health side," says Rockwood. "But it's 2006, huge numbers of patients go to web, first thing."
In the United States, $20-per-month sites that deal with mental health, such as MySelfHelp.com, are successful enterprises.
Other companies have sprung up in Atlantic Canada, taking advantage of a skilled pool of labour in the online learning industry centred in Fredericton.
Cynthia Howroyd, a speech pathologist who founded Virtual Experts Inc. in Fredericton, says the idea to create a subscribers-only website for children with autism started in 2001, while she was recovering from a car accident.
Isolated from the families she treated, she developed the idea of what she calls a "virtual autism clinic."
"That's when I started to go on the quest to get the money to do it," she says. "It was a long struggle to find the financing and build the business."
To date, the company has raised about $4 million from GrowthWorks, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, and the Business Development Bank of Canada to develop the software leading up to the launch.
The firm launched AutismPro.com at the Geneva Centre for Autism last Thursday.
The software application guides parents and health professionals working one-on-one with children who have the neurological disorder.
It's a more complex site than DementiaGuide, including a daily activity, goals for the child and caregiver to work towards, and video demonstrations.
"An activity might, with a video demonstration, show the mother taking a ball, setting the child on the floor and passing the ball back and forth, giving guidance if the child becomes upset or won't follow the instructions," says Howroyd.
The introductory monthly price is $50 a month until April, and will rise to $100 after that.
Asked if she thinks parents will balk at that amount, Howroyd argues it's much lower than the hourly rate for therapists, and avoids massive waiting lists.
Like other sites such as DementiaGuide.ca, the autism website plans to eventually use the data for medical research - another potential source of revenue.
Fred West says he doesn't mind if his response to drugs is used for research to benefit pharmaceutical companies.
"The business I'm helping is just charging for managing the database," he says.
However, Ann raises questions about whether capitalism should control such a potentially valuable source of health information.
"If they made it a non-profit venture how much would they be charging a month? That's the question."
Howroyd responds that many of the Internet start-ups began by going to governments, and were rejected.
"To finance the company, I found the most support from the venture capital community," she says.
Now it appears that online health information is firmly launched into the private sector.
"We see autism as our first product," says Howroyd.
