KindNest

Inspiration

Humans are living longer than ever. Therefore, the elder population is facing challenges with loneliness as they live longer and are separated from their family members. In turn, family members are worried about their elders' loneliness, mental health, and physical health, but they are busy with their own lives and children. We recognize this gap and want to create an app to connect family members to their elders while giving the elders a AI-enabled journaling & companion feature they can chat with to combat loneliness. We give you: KindNest.

What it does

We're building a tool that's both a friend and guardian for aging parents. While elders stay stimulated by talking about their day on KindDiary, family members can monitor for emotional wellbeing. For family members, the app will allow them to see how they are doing, track their mental and physical health, and give insights for their mood all on a daily basis. For the elders, KindDiary for them to chat with on a daily basis and track conversations in a diary format.

How we built it

It was an iterative process with both our team brainstorming as well as working with Lovable's coding and chat software to develop the prototype of our app.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to have a voice / audio feature where the elder could speak to the AI companion instead of typing messages, and we ran into issues creating this feature with Lovable.
The insights are not as accurate as we hoped. When we tested conversations with our app, it trended towards positive moods even when we would be expressing more negative emotions through the conversation.
Issues with privacy/security. We don't want anyone to see the data from our elders, so we had to add in a simple login feature for both the family members and elders to use.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Amount of features and insights within the family member dashboard
Simplicity of the elder-facing interface with the AI companion

What we learned

How to code in lovable
How to continually iterate on an idea and think about challenges and scalability
The current landscape of software and hardware tools that exist for elders, and their pain points

What's next for KindNest

Adding features on the family member side to send reminders about doctor appointments, taking pills reminders, play games, call relatives, etc. for the elder to see and use
Making the AI companion sound like the family members when speaking to the elders
Adding more features to the elder side such as daily games if we are seeing high adoption and usage from elders