MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds this thought and any decisions she might have derived from it dissolved in the black hole of her defective short-term memory. So she would not even have had the ability to take her own life to end this if she wished so. My brother and I tried many things to improve her life somewhat, only very few of those were actually a bit succesful. Two of them were digital gadgets, which we selected to provide some benefit without or at least with just very simple interactions: The best one was an LCD "picture frame" the only feature of which was to show an infinite loop of family photos stored on its SD card - she came to really like it and have it switched on quite consistently. The second one was an MP3 speaker which had a few hours of her favorite music on an SD card as well, and which could be used largely like a radio, just by pressing its play/stop button and volume buttons. This latter one she managed to enjoy at least from time to time. Best wishes to the author and his mom, and everyone in a similar situation.
My wife acquired anterograde amnesia after a car accident. This device may or may not have worked for her: she would probably have discovered the device anew every time (as in, every 10 minutes or so), although she would probably be pleased each time.
Thankfully she fully recovered after a few weeks. It takes a lot of patience to deal with someone like that, and you could tell it frequently caused a lot of frustration on her part. Every 10 minutes or so in fact.
This is one of the few HN articles that have profoundly moved me. Such a beautiful and simple use of technology to make a clear and big improvement in someone's life.
As a side note on his mother remembering that the tablet exists, it sounds like she has amnesia quite like Henry Molaison, a famous case study in neuropathology. He had very specific brain damage that seemingly stopped him forming new memories in the same way as OP's mother, but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. So for example he would have warm feelings towards people who'd been caring for him despite not remembering them, and would also pick up card games more and more quickly as he played them repeatedly despite saying he didn't remember the game. OP's mother remembering the tablet sounds very similar, particularly when paired with the feeling of being remembered and loved by her children.
> One small challenge was maximizing the size of the message text. Sometimes a message is just a word or two; other times it might be several sentences. A single font size can’t accommodate such a wide range of text content. I couldn’t find a pure CSS way to automatically maximize font size so that a text element with word wrapping would display without clipping.
> I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.
Wow -- not just for accessibility but this seems like a very useful feature to have in native CSS.
Nice find.
Overall such a heartwarming use of technology. Love.
Really nice project. One idea for “if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.” Put a start and end date/time on messages and implement in the board. That way you can pre schedule them and have them fall off automatically.
I made an eink rpi display for staying in touch with my parents, inspired by the poetry clock (https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy...).
My dad didn't like poetry clock, but he does like image gen. So we got a (color) Inky Impression 7.3 and hooked it up to an RPi.
I made a basic telegram bot that you could send a verbal prompt to ("snowy day"). It would then ask which of your favorite artist styles it should create an image in. I found that presenting a list of two styles combined had cooler results. The prompt would be used to fetch a random quote on the topic, and quote and style would then be feed to stable diffusion, and maybe 30 seconds later you have fresh art and a quote on the display.
My dad then asked if we just could forward images directly there. He prefers, each day, to post an image of whatever the day is (November 13 is "World Kindness Day") and occasionally share a family photo. My mom looks forward to seeing what day he picks every day.
Dementia is a progressive multi-system failure (CPU, RAM, SSD, Motherboard)
Anterograde Amnesia, on its own, is a failure to write to the SSD.
Medical amateurs, like tech amateurs, might struggle to differentiate between the two.
Medical professionals, like tech professionals, should not.
When it is not possible to upgrade the SSD, using the CPU and the RAM to compensate for the faulty SSD is an excellent hack.
There is a reason I check out Hacker News on an almost daily basis, this is it.
Pimeroni has a selection of eink displays up to 7.3" including some with various buttons and LEDs to make whatever you'd like. https://shop.pimoroni.com/search?q=inky
All boox tablet/e-readers just run Android. They can do literally anything Android can for folks asking about the loading and displaying of the web page. There are several "kiosk" apps and browsers with kiosk modes. Also fairly expensive Android automation tools.
This is such a wonderful story, and I'm so happy that the author found something which worked well for their mom.
> Despite her amnesia, my mom came to remember that this display exits and what it’s for. She looks forward to seeing updates from her children on it.
This is the most interesting part for me here. Brains are such wondrous things. Would be cool to know if this is a special quirk of her mom or this is something which can help others like her too.
Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears.
For example, I am already in the habit of logging every phone call to any doctor's offices or important contacts as they're happening. Being able to refer back to all the notes has helped me manage a number of complex errors. I know the name of the person I spoke to, the date, and what we discussed. Any time I need to make a call about a topic or to a company, I have an easy way to pull up all the past notes.
I'd like to think if I ever got amnesia, already having this system in place would serve me really well if I couldn't learn new things. I have the old things, and the habit of referring to and adding new things to the list.
But I wonder what else would or wouldn't be useful to try to practice now?
Does anyone know if "Start its web browser and have that browser display a designated start page." is specific thing for this tablet or if that is "normal" in android?
I want to do something similar for anki cards I'm struggling with, and I dunno if I'm in for a world of pain. I was considering https://shop.boox.com/products/go6 for my needs as it's a bit cheaper.
a commercial product along the same lines is KOMP https://komp.family/en/. We had it to communicate with our elderly grandparents until they died. Its a bit like a senior accessible social network feed for the family, including its dynamics, because the app shows what is being shown to everybody else of the family. In that regard it's a disadvantage you have some of the same dynamics going on. You dont only communicate to the grandparents, but also to the (extended) family.
I love these kinds of projects. Congratulations to the OP.
Unrelated, but does anyone know a good TV remote for elders? I'd like something like a Stream Deck with big buttons for things like :
* Turn it on/off
* Switch to TV channel 315
* Switch to TV channel 517
* Play Planet Earth on Netflix
* Play Young Sheldon on Netflix
My grandparents are 92 and 97 and even big remotes aren't cutting it. Not only that, but I'd like for them to be able to use ondemand video platforms, not only random TV channels.
To control the TV itself, it seems a RPi or ESP32 with an IR led is enough, but to put something to play on Netflix is surprisingly difficult. I'm able to control a Fire Stick using remote adb commands, but not sure how reliable it is. I'd love to find something like this off the shelf.
Technology is great, but it's not made for elders. It frustrates them (and me), and they end up feeling stupid, which angers me.
I am sure someone else must have done this, but I couldn't find it anywhere.
What a lovely read and solution.
My sister has a disability making independent living a challenge. Although I have 0 technical background, I need to start thinking and brainstorming in this manner.
I encouraged my mother, who had short-term memory issues _and_ dementia to write things down. It backfired. She's write something down, like the fact that she got a call from her gardener, then obsess over it. She'd open the book over and over and then talk about the "odd" call she got from her gardener for weeks! We had to take the book and write things like "This issue has been resolved" under the things she wrote down.
I think an e-ink that we control remotely might work for her, too. We can put an item up there and then remove it as soon as it's not relevant anymore so she won't keep re-reading it and obsessing over it.
Love this! A couple years ago I had to do similar for my grandma (94 at the time) who was losing her hearing as well as short term memory loss. Was surprised how few off the shelf options there were.
Had to write a medium article with exact instructions for how to use it otherwise she was very skeptical of using it. The only issue was that she would sometimes read aloud which would enter her into a feedback loop lol.
https://medium.com/@admangan2018/how-to-utilize-the-transcri...
The author mentions needing a small storage service and paying for JSONStorage. In fact, when I've needed this sort of thing in the past, Google Sheets is an amazing tiny database for projects. It has pretty generous API rate limits and it's convenient to be able to manage your DB live in a spreadsheet. In fact, even levels.fyi got away with a Google Forms / Google Sheets backend for a long time[1].
1. https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
This is so great, I love it. I don't have amnesia but I have lots of trouble remembering what I was going to work on next and used an e-paper display[1] to help with that. My code is a lot simpler (as the display only has an ESP32 and that isn't particularly powerful) but it can fetch a PNG image and it can display it, so my "protocol" (which I'm hesitant to call it that) is it opens a URL named 'inkstatus.html' and looks for a link of the form "http://example.com/image.png" (sadly I can't code quote that here but you get the idea, a URL pointing to image.png from the same server. It then reads that image and displays it, if the image is the same one it displayed the previous time it just does nothing and goes back to sleep for 10 seconds.
That way, all of the rendering is done on the web server (by a cron script in my case and LaTex) and display doesn't have any fiddly html/css issues it is just putting up a full size png image which was part of the library that the Soldered guys provided.
Based on the referenced article I'm going to see if I can replicate this for my Dad who is at the age where he doesn't remember things.
[1] https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...
NB: As the article mentions concerns about burn-in, this doesn't seem to be an issue for e-ink devices.
Many ship with a standard image or set of images displayed when powered off or suspended. Presumably those display for long periods of time. My experience over ~3 years with a similar Onyx BOOX device has been that those images don't burn in at all.
What is experienced is temporary ghosting which varies by display mode (these can be set either globally or per application), when partial refreshes are made. The solution is to do a full refresh every so often, for which there are a number of built-in settings, or which can be triggered manually on the tablet.
For either the author here or others looking to implement similar projects, you can very likely safely skip any consideration of burn-in, though if your interest is in crystal-clear display, full refresh can be used. Particularly when display updates are infrequent, say, < 1/minute, or any longer period.
>Since the physical device was satisfactory, the next step was writing a simple website that could drive the display.
>A Compose page my siblings and I write messages and save them to be displayed.
Is there a risk of a malicious actor discovering the website and writing in their own messages? I would think building user authentication in to the MomBoard website might be a bit heavyweight. Whats the best way to do this?
When I watched the film Memento, I found myself thinking 'holy shit, I'm not quite far away enough from this...'. No tattoos yet, but one could write a book on the stcky pads I've laying around.
As a bit of a luddite, e-ink is one of the few modern wizbangs I'm enamored with. It's so damn nice I take it as an inside woosh joke that it isn't everywhere and available without pawning my organs.
Does any commercial version of this exist? Using an existing tablet makes the DIY aspect a little less but then you have to roll your own site as well.
This is great. His one concern of remembering to remove things could be done with optional expiry.
Meeting for dinner tonight? Set the message to expire after today.
I have to deal with bouts with amnesia myself due to a dissociative disorder - this would be a really good appliance just to be able to see reminders to myself and also reminders from friends - relationships are really difficult to keep up with when its out of sight out of mind for anyone.
I'm working on a personal dashboard right now so I can have one space to leave notes for myself - I have the problem of not being able to consistently use the same tools since there are so many to reach out (social media, sms, chat apps, trello, physical notepads, .txt files). I frequently just fully forget that I've been taking notes every day, and where they're at. Building routines is, as one can imagine, really difficult. An app requires that I'm looking at my phone and can prioritize a notification. All the apps together are just too much to be able to prioritize, and I find myself hunting through all the apps for reminders or to try to ground myself.
This is a wonderful project. Many thanks to Jan for sharing it.
Separately, regarding dementia, it is both less and more complicated than many commenters suggest.
From UCSF Neuroscience’s excellent Memory and Aging Center resources:
“Dementia is a general term for any disease that causes a change in memory and/or thinking skills that is severe enough to impair a person’s daily functioning… There are many different types of dementia… Most types of dementia cause a gradual worsening of symptoms over the course of years due to progressive damage to nerve cells in the brain caused by the underlying disease process…” [0]
Even more briefly: dementia is an umbrella term, many diseases can cause dementia, and those diseases may or may not be progressive.
I love this. I wonder whether it would be useful to add a small indication of how roughly how long ago a message was written. For example, the first message might say 'this afternoon' or 'yesterday'. If it was written this afternoon, I know the dinner it's referring to is coming up, and wasn't yesterday.
I feel this could be a product that would see some success in the retail market.
It solved a personal problem.
Amazing mission behind the tech.
Could solve a myriad of issues for other families. This part is unproven, but that's why it would be cool to see the author release it as a product!
Could start by simply putting up a payment page and making them bespoke as orders start coming in.
This is awesome and I am happy to read that she was able to remember the device and asks if things have been added to it. My parents have just retired and I wonder if something like this would be advantageous to introduce prior to signs of memory loss. My grandmother had Alzheimers and while it is different than the amnesia that OP references, her memories were lost in reverse chronological order (can't remember where her keys are, but could remember where her last job was, later could not remember that last job, but could remember her first job, etc). So introducing this prior to those recent memory lapses could help solidify that device in my parents head so that they could benefit from it even if they do start to exhibit that behavior.
My mom is in an assisted living center. The floor above hers is reserved for memory care residents. I'd love to see how to incorporate this into their affairs.
Cool use of tech!
> I ended up writing a small JavaScript function to maximize font size: it makes the text invisible (via CSS visibility: hidden), tries displaying the text at a very large size, and then tries successively smaller font sizes until it finds a size that lets all the text fit. It then makes the text visible again.
That would be a good application for dichotomic search if performance was ever a problem (I doubt it though).
More generally, having elements on a grid of different sizes should hopefully be much more easy once CSS masonry grid is available.
Dealing with dementia in the elderly is difficult enough, but it has a progression and you can feel how close you're getting to the end. Having to provide a similar level of care to someone who may live on for decades seems like a living nightmare. My heart goes out to this man and any others with similar burdens.
btw. you should write date of message on each message, on top of current date
I've been wanting to use an Inkplate 10 for my own mom, who doesn't have amnesia but is deaf. But, like the Boox that TFA uses, it has a 10" display which is too small imho. It would be great if they would finally start making bigger ones. 14" (A4 or letter size) is about as small as I'd want if I had my way.
I quickly searched for Google Calendar and nothing came up.
A good 'trick' would be to have a Gmail account (calendar, and all), share the password with the 'inner circle' and anyone can post anything they want and it will appear on the google calendar, in "Agenda" mode
Would it be possible to use a device like Google Nest Hub 2. for the similar purpose? It is quite a bit cheaper, I have an old mother which still is clear in the head but often have problems with her mobile phone. Would also be easier for us to share pictures of her grandchildren and such.
Some time ago I considered doing something similar for my parents. They're both fine, but since I live in another country, it could be a creative gift to send them messages on special occasions. I would use an e-ink display attached to an ESP8266 or similar though.
A little off topic, but on the subject of E-Ink, here is an analysis of a Kindle display with optical coherence tomography images: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05174
This is a very interesting idea. My father has dementia. I'm not sure this would really work in this use case. He wouldn't remember to look at the display. Like I said, I'm not sure about this. It might be worth trying though.
"To medical professionals her condition looks a lot like dementia — amnesia is a common symptom of dementia — but she doesn’t have dementia. One difference is that (as I understand it) dementia is a progressive disease, while this amnesia is stable."
Dementia is a multi-system failure, memory + CPU. Amnesia, on its own, is a failure of memory, the CPU is working fine. Medical amateurs, like tech amateurs, may be confused by the difference. Tech professionals, like medical professionals, ought not to be.
Since we do not yet have the capability to switch out human memory 'cards', making use of the CPU to compensate for the faulty memory card is a great hack.
There is a reason I check out Hacker News on an almost daily basis. This is it.
> we have to be careful to keep it up to date; if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.
Could tweak the UI to add an expiration date on the initial input screen, with a sensible default (maybe 2 weeks?)
Flashback to 50 First Dates. Drew Barrymore is a national treasure.
This product is pretty slick. The e-ink looks very natural. Anyone compared this to a Kindle or reMarkable Paper Pro?
This gives me hope in humanity. This is using tech to humanize.
Glad I went on HN today. My grandma has dementia and I've been leaving paper reminders around the house. Maybe I should try something like this. Wishing you and your family the best.
This is what Meta Portal could have been. It's not about going high tech and fancy UI. It's the human kindness that makes tech beautiful.
Cool! Btw, I make this: https://framed.news/ framed e-ink news display
I have always dreamt of something like this to connect with aging loved ones. I would love something that they could also listen to with a big button to play recent messages.
Would this work for someone with dementia as well?
It really is the small things, fun being able to use hacky superpowers like this. makes me want to call my mom :)
This is beautiful in ways i can't put into words. Sometimes you find an article that just hits man
"I was concerned about the possibility of e-ink burn-in"
Happily, e-ink displays don't suffer from burn-in.
That is beautiful and heartwarming, technology really can make good sometimes
This is a great idea. thanks for sharing it. I might need this for myself someday.
Priceless! Well done Jan. Thank you for sharing this amazing project.
HN does not usually make me cry!
Respect
Hello mom.
Wonderful idea
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It might be worthwhile to look at how an LLM might assist someone with this condition. A lot of the persistence hacks used on LLM chatbots are addressing the lack of retained memories outside of the context window, so maybe something like RAG could help your mom live a less limited life, or reduce some of the burden on you or other caretakers.
Brilliant use of tech, I'm happy when I see someone turn their nerd-powers to things that unabashedly make life better. Good work!
What a beautiful use of technology to uphold someone's personhood, and let them know they are loved, despite (and with regard to) a profound injury.
This reminds me of a desire I've had for a long time: a simple, wall-mountable eInk device that could be configured with a URL (+wifi creds) and render a markdown file, refreshing once every hour or so. It would be so useful for so many applications – I'm a parish priest and so I could use it to let people know what events are on, if a service is cancelled, the current prayer list, ... the applications would be endless. I'd definitely pay a couple of hundred dollars per device for a solid version of such a thing, if it could be mounted and then recharged every month or two.