The 30-second pitch
Rosa taught kindergarten for 31 years, and at 3 PM she still gets restless, because her body remembers the bell. Companion Care is a calm AI companion for people with early-to-mid stage dementia. It talks with the patient in the cloned voice of someone she trusts, with the emotion fitting her mood, and it steers every reply toward a happy memory. Her caregiver logs the day in 60 seconds. The app learns what unsettles her and what calms her, and gives her doctor a 90-second summary of the months between visits: counts and dates, never a diagnosis.
Inspiration
Care happens between clinic visits. Earlier University of Houston research and interviews with caregivers highlighted the need for clear guidance, a simple symptom log, and connection through music and personal memories. We built Companion Care at CodeRED: Orion to bring the patient, caregiver, and doctor into one shared picture.
What it does
The patient sees one cherished photo and three large actions: Talk, My people, and My music. Replies are short, reassuring, and shaped around her own life instead of quizzing or correcting her. The app works in English and Spanish.
The caregiver records what happened, what came before, what was tried, and what followed. A transparent trigger fingerprint counts repeated patterns over a rolling 90 days and shows one only after at least four matching observations. It describes what was logged, without claiming what caused a change. The caregiver also gets safety flags, hand-off tools, and an Ask assistant.
The doctor receives a concise view of counts, dates, sleep, patterns, and what helped. Every summary says “Observations only — not a diagnosis.”
Rosa is a fictional demo patient. Her synthetic record contains 12 logs and 8 difficult episodes; 5 afternoon agitation episodes occur near the time she once left school, and music with dim light was followed by relief in 6 of the 8 episodes. The public demo's Talk experience uses live AI with safe fallbacks. Its caregiver Ask answers, pattern cards, and summary are prepared from Rosa's synthetic data. Signed-in accounts calculate patterns and summaries from their own logs.
How we built it
Gemini writes replies behind input and output safety guardrails. ElevenLabs provides a cloned caregiver voice with an emotion matched to the moment. Backboard holds patient-safe life memory separately from private caregiver observations. Tiger Data provides PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB for per-family records and time-based logs, with row-level security. Vultr hosts the app over HTTPS. The application is built with TanStack Start, React, and TypeScript.
Our team built the dementia-specific behavior: the calm interface, reminiscence-first prompting, guardrails, memory separation, transparent fingerprint, and doctor summary. We tested difficult English and Spanish prompts and household isolation, and added time limits and fallbacks around outside services. The repository credits Anthropic Claude for AI-assisted coding.
Challenges, accomplishments, and lessons
A familiar voice needs consent. A warm AI answer still needs hard limits for emergencies, medication, diagnosis, and distress. The patient's memory must not expose caregiver-only notes. We also had to make every chart and narrative agree with the same underlying counts and keep the demo usable when an API is slow. We are proud of a working, bilingual, no-sign-up demo with a patient view, caregiver workflow, and doctor summary. We learned to make observations traceable to logs and to give every external service a safe fallback.
What's next
This is a prototype on synthetic data, built to be calm for the patient and safe by design, with a clear path to HIPAA-ready hosting. It is not currently HIPAA compliant, a medical device, or clinically validated. Before using real patient data, we need clinician review, signed vendor agreements, a formal risk assessment, an audit log, stronger deletion and sign-in controls, and evidence of clinical benefit. Our research roadmap starts with a Houston pilot through care partners.
Built With
- backboard
- claude
- elevenlabs
- gemini
- tigerdata
- vultr
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