Remindful: Designing Reminder Systems for Caregiver Interpretation in Dementia Care
TLDR
Remindful is a new reminder system designed for dementia care that helps caregivers interpret engagement over time, moving beyond simple one-way prompting.
Key contributions
- Remindful platform extends task prompting with caregiver-facing alerts, summaries, and review features.
- Examines how reminder-based caregiver awareness functions through interviews and in-home deployments.
- Shows reminder systems support caregiver reassurance, coordination, and awareness of routines.
- Highlights that reminder data is highly context-dependent, shaped by various real-world factors.
Why it matters
Remindful introduces a reminder system for dementia care, aiding caregiver interpretation. It argues for designing these systems as assistive infrastructures that support contextual sensemaking, recognizing reminder data's context-dependency. This is crucial for effective home-based care.
Original Abstract
Digital reminder systems are widely used in dementia care to support everyday tasks, but they are typically designed for one-way prompting rather than helping caregivers interpret engagement over time. We present Remindful, a caregiver-informed reminder platform that extends task prompting with caregiver-facing alerts, summaries, and review features to support awareness in home-based dementia care. Drawing on formative caregiver interviews, lived-experience advisor input, and in-home deployments with two caregiver-PLwD dyads, we examine how reminder-based caregiver awareness functions in practice. Our findings show that reminder systems can support caregiver reassurance, household coordination, and awareness of routines over time, but that reminder interaction data is highly context-dependent. Household participation, prompt attribution, routine mismatch, accessibility barriers, and technical failures all shaped what reminder logs could reasonably mean. We argue that reminder systems should not be treated as neutral behavioral sensors, but designed as assistive infrastructures for caregiver interpretation that preserve uncertainty and support contextual sensemaking in real homes.
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