Hi Sylvia
you are so right! It is not so much the simplicity of something, it is the newness - dementia patients don't adapt to anything new. It is, to a certain extent, the lack of understanding of the relevance of the new thing, and partly coordination of body and brain.
In the last years that Jan was at home, I took over everything that needed to be done in the home. This was after I had searched for, and found, the simplest washing machine I could [costing £600]- one that just required filling with clothes, then one button being pressed. When Jan couldn't manage that - indeed she became very agitated when I tried to show her how - I finally realised we'd reached the end of a stage that had started with her first symptoms. At that time, we'd just switched the PC from DOS to the early Windows software, and for the first time Jan needed to understand how to use a mouse. She never did, and that marked her last time using the PC. Previously she had helped me by typing in all the articles for our local church newsletter.