The ALS Association has launched My ALS Journey™, a new interactive, web-based tool that allows people living with ALS to take control of their journey with the disease. Developed in consultation with the ALS community, My ALS Journey is designed to put individuals living with ALS in the driver’s seat of their own health care journey.
For people living with ALS, the enjoyment and escape video games may have once brought is far too often another thing the disease takes from them. As muscles weaken and fine motor functions decrease, handling video game controllers and keeping up with fast-paced game play can cause frustration and cause people to give up on gaming all together.
ALS doesn’t care where a person lives, and a person with ALS in Florence, Italy is as much in need of reliable care and resources as someone in Florence, South Carolina. At the International Alliance of ALS/MND Association meeting in late 2022, proud “Mapper” members Amanda Stanko, senior solution engineer at Esri, and Pat (who joined remotely) shared how they are taking their clinic mapping tool internationally to provide the resource for people with ALS around the world.
Pat was a former solutions team lead at Esri, a geographic information system (GIS) company, and spent his 25-year career in GIS creatively using mapping technology to solve real-world problems in the utility industry. Forced to retire in 2018 due to the progression of his disease, he had no idea where his passion for mapping and data would take him. “After my diagnosis, I wanted to bring GIS to the ALS battle, but wasn’t sure where to start,” says Pat.
