Searching for Solutions: Tools to Help Care Givers of Elderly/Aging and Patients of Dementia
With aging comes an increased dependence on care-givers even for the most basic activities of daily living. Of all the possibilities of aging, none is more devastating to both the patients and the care-givers than the Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia related conditions. While the race for cure for Dementia and deeper understanding is on, there is a pressing need for tools and methods to help the patients and care givers cope with the 36 hour days.
Although our journey started with a focus on dementia and MCI related conditions, we envision to embrace the broader problem of elderly care-giving, specifically to help aging and elderly in general and their care-givers. The growing demand cannot simply be met by formal health-care system. More often than not, a large part of the care-giving responsibility will and still falls on the shoulders of informal care-givers (e.g., family members, friends, untrained/low-skilled care providers) and they will need help!
Large part of care-giving involves supporting ADL’s (activities of daily living – physical care, logistics, coordination) and this has been a driver of a lot of product development and innovation. However, when asked patients and care-givers express a strong need for tools and solutions that help them live better, cope with the demanding long days, and take care of themselves. Our goal is to focus on this second category of needs.
We envision our user community to encompass care-givers (of all ages and 
education levels) and their care-receivers (aging, elderly, physically and cognitively challenged) from all economic classes around the world. This broad view greatly influences our design choices. Given the wide range
of age and technical experience of our target user group, our tools and solutions need to be “smart” and usable by everyone. Our goal to reach all socio-economic groups means that our products need to be accessible and affordable. Given the computing power and almost universal ubiquity of mobile devices (smart phones, tablets), smart mobile devices are a natural choice as the ideal delivery vehicle for care-giving tools. In the environment our user community lives one size does not fit all; at the advanced age people respond to same problems and remedies in very different ways and the same person could respond differently at different times. Thus our products have to be adaptive and greatly personalized. Creating infinite variations of products is not a viable option. Thus we need to build tools and platforms to enable our user community and volunteers to create their own solutions following the spirit of DIY and Makers.