Memento — asking questions of a journal

Raihan Rafeek, Kaaustaaub Shankar, Grant Kilgard and I mostly started because we wanted to work together. We were making a dance app. More computer vision. There was a loose chain of projects going, mostly because we kept finding another excuse to use whatever we'd just learned: SignLink, KUKA, and now another computer vision thing for people.

Then Grant brought up a real problem. His grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and his grandmother had gotten involved in advocacy around Alzheimer's and related dementia. We spoke with her, scrapped the dance app, and started working on memory.

What bugged me about a normal journal is that you still have to remember enough to find the thing you forgot. You need the date, or the right keyword, or the entry itself. With Memento the question was the index. You could ask "Where did I put my glasses?", "What did I do Tuesday?" or "Who visited last week?"

The journal could hold text, photos, audio and location. The person or a caregiver records the day. Later the user asks about whatever they still remember enough to ask about, and the system goes back through the record.

There was also a side for clinicians. If the same question kept coming up, we wanted that repetition to show up as a pattern over time instead of getting lost in separate conversations. Sharing that with a caregiver or doctor was opt-in.

Grant led the design. He worked out the whole app in Figma, from onboarding to adding photos, places and voice notes to an entry, and then handed it to the rest of us to build. These are his screens.

His write-up of the design¹ has the rest of it.