Remindful: Designing Reminder Systems for Caregiver Interpretation in Dementia Care

TL;DR

Remindful is a caregiver-centered reminder platform for dementia care that enhances caregiver awareness through alerts and summaries, emphasizing interpretative support over mere prompting.

Contribution

It introduces a caregiver-informed reminder system that supports interpretation and contextual understanding in home-based dementia care, based on real-world deployment and user input.

Findings

Reminder systems support caregiver reassurance and household coordination.

Reminder interaction data is highly context-dependent and influenced by various factors.

Designing reminder systems as interpretative infrastructures enhances caregiver understanding.

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.