Remindful: Designing Reminder Systems for Caregiver Interpretation in Dementia Care

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lai, Joy, Mihailidis, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lai, Joy
Mihailidis, Alex
author_facet Lai, Joy
Mihailidis, Alex
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Remindful: Designing Reminder Systems for Caregiver Interpretation in Dementia Care
Lai, Joy
Mihailidis, Alex
Human-Computer Interaction
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.
title Remindful: Designing Reminder Systems for Caregiver Interpretation in Dementia Care
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19574