13 ms·

MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

2106 points by pabs3 2y ago

sarahdous 2y ago
That is beautiful and heartwarming, technology really can make good sometimes
bravura 2y ago
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-rhymes-diy-project 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.
- HansardExpert 2y ago
  > inspired by the poetry clock (https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy...). That's fun. Although, from the article: > There’s one other problem, though. It’s well known that AI language models like ChatGPT have a tendency to make up data (sometimes known as “hallucinations”), and it turns out that’s true even if you’re just telling the time. Roughly once every 15 minutes, says Webb, the clock will simply lie about the time just to make a certain rhyme work. “The fibbing is hilarious. Sometimes you can’t tell — it might say ‘one past two’ when it’s actually ‘two past one,’” he says. He says this will be fixable but, for now, is a fun quirk of the system. “Clockwork means you get precision drift; AI-work means you get hallucination drift.” ;)
grahameb 2y ago
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.
- djbusby 2y ago
  There has been a number of these on HN. Other features too. The first one I remember seeing was MagicMirror (not e-ink) ages ago.
- yrxuthst 2y ago
  You may be interested in https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal, it looks like it's out of stock at the moment but they have pre-made devices or you can make your own with a list of parts.
  - pbronez 2y ago
    That is super cool! I might need to build one of those. My family needs a way to keep the fridge calendar up to date with our digital calendar.
    - ryanckulp 2y ago
      for your family cal, check out TRMNL. can go on a fridge w/ magnets: https://usetrmnl.com https://usetrmnl.com (disclaimer, i'm the founder)
      - emilburzo 2y ago
        Are there any plans to have a version without the battery? It looks exactly like what I've been looking for otherwise. Also, what country are the orders shipped from? US?
krisoft 2y ago
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.
- wjnc 2y ago
  Somebody else posted Henry Molaison [1] and there is a link to Repetition priming [2]. Seems some memories are stored in other locations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming
smeej 2y ago
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?
- frereubu 2y ago
  If I'm right that this condition is like that of Henry Molaison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison - then the real difficulty is that you don't remember that you have amnesia.
  - smeej 2y ago
    Well yes, but my current "write down the details of my calls and refer back to them every time" wouldn't require me to remember I had amnesia, right? For now, I do remember those past conversations, but if I stopped remembering them, having them up on my screen in the side panel of my note-taking app would still make them available to me if I didn't. That's the kind of idea I'm looking for.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  Sign language and brail come to mind as useful in this regard (if not for you, then for a loved one). As for amnesia, it seems like a habit of making notes and seeking out to read your own notes would be useful. However, the trend in technology to constantly change behaviour, appearance, and functionality makes anything digital a barrier. Manual notes are also susceptible to being impossible for ageing people to make. So it's really hard to think of something.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
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.
- lbotos 2y ago
  https://www.invisible-computers.com/ https://www.invisible-computers.com/ The creator is on HN too.
- ronakjain90 2y ago
  You should check out usetrmnl.com. It's commercially available and has 50+ native plugins and many community driven recipes[1]. Disclosure: I'm from the TRMNL team. [1] - https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins
- urtie 2y ago
  Well, for the Dutch market there's Luna: https://www.nedap-luna.com/ https://www.nedap-luna.com/. This has the advantage of being integrated fully into a formal care structure and of several years of research in how to best present information specifically for patients with cognitive issues.
shireboy 2y ago
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.
- zrail 2y ago
  It might be nice to add default messages that can auto-populate the date so she won't notice if network goes down for awhile or someone forgets to post a message.
  - jdiff 2y ago
    Nah, at that point, just let mom call.
    - vanderZwan 2y ago
      This assumes the mother can form the new memory required to remember to call in that situation, which she by definition of the disease can't.
      - jdiff 2y ago
        It (hopefully, theoretically) shouldn't make that assumption. It only relies on her apparent natural tendency to call her kids when/as she believes she hasn't heard from them in some time.
- sushid 2y ago
  Agreed, or an expiry timer (e.g. this message expires in 12 hours).
- efilife 2y ago
  Would also be good to display the current date alongside the messages' date
  - 2y ago
eth0up 2y ago
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.
frereubu 2y ago
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.
- ghosty141 2y ago
  > but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. This reminds me of muscle memory. I can play pieces on the piano even though I don't actively remember the sheet music of them. My hands just "know" what to do. Funnily enough the moment I start actively thinking about certain passages that ability worsens by a lot.
  - frereubu 2y ago
    In psychology memory is divided up into various groupings depending on what people are interested in, e.g. explicit (remembering that Paris is the capital of France) and implicit (remembering how to ride a bike). You can further subdivide explicit into semantic (Paris is the capital of France) and episodic (events that you have experienced), and implicit into procedural (how to ride a bike) and emotional conditioning (memories of feelings). Those categories aren't related to neurophysiology though, which is where I think it gets really interesting because I doubt matches those rather Platonic categories.
  - mathieuh 2y ago
    Yes same for me on guitar. If I try to play something too slowly or if I really start thinking about what I'm doing it all falls apart. I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.
devwastaken 2y ago
[flagged]
- fortran77 2y ago
  You come into every thread just to say how we need to get rid of property laws. What does that accomplish?
  - rvnx 2y ago
    (not the original poster), a reminder that changing the law is important in many situations and can change real-life impact of people (for example with this tablet, or with blood oxygen feature of Apple) ? If we had truly enforced software patents we wouldn't see widespread LLMs.
sheerun 2y ago
Wonderful idea
albert_e 2y ago
> 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.
- zackmorris 2y ago
  I've been watching the evolution of the web since 1995, and I remember when css got popular in the late 90s thinking that it didn't match real-world use cases. Somehow design-by-committee took us from drawing our sites with tables in the browser's WYSIWYG editor, to not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have. Css jumped the shark and today I'd vote to scrap it entirely, which I know is a strong and controversial statement. But I grew up with Microsoft Word and Aldus PageMaker, and desktop publishing was arguably better in the 1980s than it is today. Because everyone could use it to get real work done at their family-owned small businesses, long before we had the web or tech support. Why are we writing today's interfaces in what amounts to assembly language? Anyway, I just discovered how float is really supposed to work with shape-outside. Here's an example that can be seen by clicking the Run code snippet button: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33953666 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33953666 Notice how this tiny bit of markup flows like a magazine article. Browsers should have been able to do this from day one. But they were written by unix and PC people, not human interface experts like, say, Bill Atkinson. Just look at how many years it took outline fonts to work using strokes and shadows, so early websites couldn't even place text over images without looking like Myspace. I think that css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements, sort of like with calc() and @media queries (although @media arguably shouldn't exist, because mobile shouldn't be its own thing either). And we should have more powerful typesetting metaphors than justify. Edit: that would adjust font size automatically to fit within a container element. IMHO the original sin of css was that it tried to give everyone a cookie cutter media-agnostic layout tool, when we'd probably be better off with the more intuitive auto flow of Qt, dropping down to a constraint matrix like Apple's Auto Layout when needed. Disclaimer: I'm a backend developer, and watching how much frontend effort is required to accomplish so little boggles my mind.
heopd 2y ago
a commercial product along the same lines is KOMP https://komp.family/en/ 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.
- devsda 2y ago
  I don't know if it's because we are conditioned by our interaction with TV and mobiles, but active LCD screens feel like they are screaming for our attention and an always on display will mostly be a distraction. E-ink displays don't have this, they just blend in.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  20£ per month is a pretty steep subscription
headup 2y ago
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.
lbotos 2y ago
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 https://shop.boox.com/products/go6 for my needs as it's a bit cheaper.
- speleding 2y ago
  When starting Chromium you can pass a `--kiosk` option with one (or more ) URLs of the pages you want to display
- matteason 2y ago
  I've used https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ on Android tablets before (as meeting room status screens) and that's worked really well
- themoonisachees 2y ago
  I don't know the specific mechanism used in the OP, but android has several mechanisms that can be used to start an app on reboot. Take a look around a Google search, I'm sure you'll find what you need
OptCohTomo 2y ago
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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05174
D13Fd 2y ago
> 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?)
tekchip 2y ago
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 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.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  That's cool, but: > It takes approximately 40 seconds to refresh this display I think that would rule it out for the purpose of this project - the demo in their introduction video[0] shows that it flashes multiple colors for ages during this long refresh. I imagine that could be very confusing for someone whose short-term memory might not last that long. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluopgSoSWY&t=500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluopgSoSWY&t=500s
  - oakesm9 2y ago
    The colour screen have a much slower refresh than the others. The greyscale one I have takes less than a second with minimal flashing.
    - vanderZwan 2y ago
      Yeah, a black and white version would probably have been fine. Somewhat frustratingly they don't seem to have a 7 inch greyscale one though, only colour versions! Maybe they used to but stopped selling them? EDIT: posted this before I noticed harpastrum's comment
- harpastum 2y ago
  If you're comfortable with microcontrollers (esp32/arduino), I can definitely recommend Inkplate. I found them when I was making a similar setup for my parents, and they have various sizes up to 10" and up to 6 colors they can display. You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites. https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/ https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/
cynicalpeace 2y ago
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.
sheerun 2y ago
btw. you should write date of message on each message, on top of current date
- sheerun 2y ago
  Why downvotes? For someone with amnesia it is not clear what date message was written if someone has written "today"..
bregma 2y ago
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.
- biomcgary 2y ago
  Glad she recovered!
  - archon810 2y ago
    Yeah, given OP's post, I didn't think this user's comment had a happy ending. That's great.
    - thisOtterBeGood 2y ago
      Yeah, should've lead differently.
      - infermore 2y ago
        i thought "acquired" was a good clue
- edarchis 2y ago
  That illustrates the difference between anterograde amnesia and dementia. Dementia is a general degradation of the brain that includes memory but you can have amnesia with an otherwise perfectly functional brain. A patient with dementia would never text her kids as in OP's case. Glad that your wife got over it.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    My grandpa had dementia. Last time me and my mom flew over to visit he didn't recognize either of us the first day. He didn't even remember having a daughter. Second day he vaguely recognized my mom but not me. Third and last day of our stay, as soon as I entered the living room he lit up and exclaimed my name. We sat and talked for hours, reminiscing past events with great details, until we had to leave for the plane home.
Miraste 2y ago
"I was concerned about the possibility of e-ink burn-in" Happily, e-ink displays don't suffer from burn-in.
- devsda 2y ago
  Had the same thought but then I remembered coming across this. Can't say if it is due to burn-in but some manufacturers do recommend refreshing the display image periodically like every 24 hours [1]. See precautions #4 https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/4.2inch_e-Paper_Module_(B)_Manual#Precautions https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/4.2inch_e-Paper_Module_(B)_Ma...
  - Miraste 2y ago
    Interesting. Waveshare makes this recommendation across their product line, and from what I can glean from google, their displays really do develop permanent artifacts if they're not refreshed. I've never seen another epaper company say this, and anecdotally I've seen ereaders that held the same image for months or years work perfectly fine, even with no power for refreshes. I don't know why there would be a difference.
jairuhme 2y ago
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.
costcopizza 2y ago
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.
jimbobthemighty 2y ago
Respect
gibolt 2y ago
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.
fortran77 2y ago
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.
- creer 2y ago
  This is the kind of feedback I was looking for. These are not conditions that we are familiar with - and so the user interface for such things is not necesarily obvious. For example: - I would expect that their and your mom did not forget how to use a web browser when they acquired short term memory issues. So a web browser interface (links, scrolling, buttons) might still be fine. - I was surprised that in the posters' display, the date / time of each msg was not shown. - I was susprised that there is no reminder "Mum, since an operation, you rarely form short term memories." Wouldn't it make sense that even that is not forming a memory? - As you mention, remove the item or mention how it was resolved.
pants2 2y ago
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-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
mvidal01 2y ago
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.
fblp 2y ago
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.
djsavvy 2y ago
Would this work for someone with dementia as well?
hola_hola_hola 2y ago
[dead]
krtab 2y ago
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.
trinsic2 2y ago
This is a great idea. thanks for sharing it. I might need this for myself someday.
admangan 2y ago
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-transcribe-function-on-a-samsung-tablet-d8b908f40262 https://medium.com/@admangan2018/how-to-utilize-the-transcri...
boutell 2y ago
HN does not usually make me cry!
vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
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.
- Loughla 2y ago
  I would like to second this. I tried a number of options with my grandpa and they always failed for one reason or another. If anyone has a solution in this space, I would be very interested.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Is their problem the size (big buttons) or the UI complexity the buttons control (trying to navigate on Netflix is a PITA compared to hitting a preset channel button)? On the former I had luck with one of those jumbo remotes that just has a few buttons (channel up/down, volume up/down, power, mute) and separately programming the TV to only have the channels they cared about in the list. When it came to smart apps it just became impossible to try to fix via the remote as the remote wasn't really the problem.
  - vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
    It's the UI, especially for Netflix or other streaming apps. I want something that is totally foolproof. Just click and it starts.
  - greentxt 2y ago
observationist 2y ago
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!
- Flex247A 2y ago
  Not a good idea for someone with memory loss to use an LLM, especially when they are prone to hallucination!
BatmansMom 2y ago
>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?
- S04dKHzrKT 2y ago
  When you have a site with a fixed, tiny amount of users, I'd opt for HTTP basic auth (via HTTPS). Whether you're using nginx, Traefik, Caddy, etc..., it's very easy to setup. If you're using something like Cloudflare Pages, I would guess you could setup a worker to handle it for you (though I'm not familiar enough with workers to be sure).
  - Normal_gaussian 2y ago
    You're right; its easy enough with Cloudflare Workers. They have a sample that is pretty decent: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/basic-auth/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/basic-aut...
Snacklive 2y ago
This is beautiful in ways i can't put into words. Sometimes you find an article that just hits man
te0006 2y ago
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.
- froh 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - matharmin 2y ago
    They did not say it was dementia, and they did not offer care suggestions - they merely shared their own related experience.
  - fastball 2y ago
    I do not understand the relevance of the sections you have chosen to highlight here.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    Outside of the fact that afaik they didn't, I would think this is intended to anyone who may contact the author as it is a personal blog. This is the comment section on a post shared by someone else as I understand it.
rahimnathwani 2y ago
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.
taurath 2y ago
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.
- ronakjain90 2y ago
  That's the exact reason we built TRMNL, because your phone is consistently trying to seek your attention (hence distraction). TRMNL helps build personal dashboard without necessarily creating chaos. We built handful of native integrations[1], but you can completely hack it and create your own dashboard with simple HTML content[2]. [1] https://usetrmnl.com/integrations https://usetrmnl.com/integrations [2] https://usetrmnl.com/framework https://usetrmnl.com/framework
throwaway81523 2y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
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 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-copy/ https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...
- ronakjain90 2y ago
  I think you should also checkout TRMNL. Being engineers ourself security/privacy is of atmost concern, and we follow a similar architecture mentioned above. You could create a private plugin and send in data in the form of REST APIs[1]. You could also use your own webserver by hacking the firmware[2] [1]-https://help.usetrmnl.com/en/articles/9510536-private-plugins https://help.usetrmnl.com/en/articles/9510536-private-plugin... [2]-https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/main/include/config.h#L49 https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/main/include/confi...
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    That is an excellent pointer. Thanks!
staub 2y ago
It really is the small things, fun being able to use hacky superpowers like this. makes me want to call my mom :)
kennethh 2y ago
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.
ANarrativeApe 2y ago
"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.
ANarrativeApe 2y ago
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.
- ayewo 2y ago
  Although this is a PC-centric way of explaining the difference between Dementia and Anterograde Amnesia, I really like it nonetheless :)
dredmorbius 2y ago
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.
- swyx 2y ago
  lovely note thank you. i checked out Boox and it seems to all be sold out - any ideas how to get one (or a good enough alternative) today?
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Sorry, no idea what Onyx's inventory status / fulfillment time is. I'd bought mine a few years back through their online store. Arrived in a few days as I recall. <https://onyxboox.com/product#actual https://onyxboox.com/product#actual> Onyx refresh their offerings frequently, though older models typically still sell for a while. You might be between offerings. You can also likely buy used from online sales sites (e.g., Craigslist, eBay).
consultSKI 2y ago
Priceless! Well done Jan. Thank you for sharing this amazing project.
pathikrit 2y ago
Cool! Btw, I make this: https://framed.news/ https://framed.news/ framed e-ink news display
GTP 2y ago
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.
HenryBemis 2y ago
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
lacoolj 2y ago
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?
low_tech_punk 2y ago
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.
dewarrn1 2y ago
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. 0: https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia
mud_dauber 2y ago
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.
causality0 2y ago
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.
brionsr 2y ago
Hello mom.
more_corn 2y ago
This gives me hope in humanity. This is using tech to humanize.

2106 points by pabs3 2y ago

That is beautiful and heartwarming, technology really can make good sometimes

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-rhymes-diy-project 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.

HansardExpert 2y ago
> inspired by the poetry clock (https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy...). That's fun. Although, from the article: > There’s one other problem, though. It’s well known that AI language models like ChatGPT have a tendency to make up data (sometimes known as “hallucinations”), and it turns out that’s true even if you’re just telling the time. Roughly once every 15 minutes, says Webb, the clock will simply lie about the time just to make a certain rhyme work. “The fibbing is hilarious. Sometimes you can’t tell — it might say ‘one past two’ when it’s actually ‘two past one,’” he says. He says this will be fixable but, for now, is a fun quirk of the system. “Clockwork means you get precision drift; AI-work means you get hallucination drift.” ;)

grahameb 2y ago

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.

djbusby 2y ago
There has been a number of these on HN. Other features too. The first one I remember seeing was MagicMirror (not e-ink) ages ago.
yrxuthst 2y ago
You may be interested in https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal https://github.com/aceinnolab/Inkycal, it looks like it's out of stock at the moment but they have pre-made devices or you can make your own with a list of parts.
- pbronez 2y ago
  That is super cool! I might need to build one of those. My family needs a way to keep the fridge calendar up to date with our digital calendar.
  - ryanckulp 2y ago
    for your family cal, check out TRMNL. can go on a fridge w/ magnets: https://usetrmnl.com https://usetrmnl.com (disclaimer, i'm the founder)
    - emilburzo 2y ago
      Are there any plans to have a version without the battery? It looks exactly like what I've been looking for otherwise. Also, what country are the orders shipped from? US?

krisoft 2y ago

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.

wjnc 2y ago
Somebody else posted Henry Molaison [1] and there is a link to Repetition priming [2]. Seems some memories are stored in other locations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_priming

smeej 2y ago

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?

frereubu 2y ago
If I'm right that this condition is like that of Henry Molaison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison - then the real difficulty is that you don't remember that you have amnesia.
- smeej 2y ago
  Well yes, but my current "write down the details of my calls and refer back to them every time" wouldn't require me to remember I had amnesia, right? For now, I do remember those past conversations, but if I stopped remembering them, having them up on my screen in the side panel of my note-taking app would still make them available to me if I didn't. That's the kind of idea I'm looking for.
aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
Sign language and brail come to mind as useful in this regard (if not for you, then for a loved one). As for amnesia, it seems like a habit of making notes and seeking out to read your own notes would be useful. However, the trend in technology to constantly change behaviour, appearance, and functionality makes anything digital a barrier. Manual notes are also susceptible to being impossible for ageing people to make. So it's really hard to think of something.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

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.

lbotos 2y ago
https://www.invisible-computers.com/ https://www.invisible-computers.com/ The creator is on HN too.
ronakjain90 2y ago
You should check out usetrmnl.com. It's commercially available and has 50+ native plugins and many community driven recipes[1]. Disclosure: I'm from the TRMNL team. [1] - https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins https://github.com/usetrmnl/plugins
urtie 2y ago
Well, for the Dutch market there's Luna: https://www.nedap-luna.com/ https://www.nedap-luna.com/. This has the advantage of being integrated fully into a formal care structure and of several years of research in how to best present information specifically for patients with cognitive issues.

shireboy 2y ago

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.

zrail 2y ago
It might be nice to add default messages that can auto-populate the date so she won't notice if network goes down for awhile or someone forgets to post a message.
- jdiff 2y ago
  Nah, at that point, just let mom call.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    This assumes the mother can form the new memory required to remember to call in that situation, which she by definition of the disease can't.
    - jdiff 2y ago
      It (hopefully, theoretically) shouldn't make that assumption. It only relies on her apparent natural tendency to call her kids when/as she believes she hasn't heard from them in some time.
sushid 2y ago
Agreed, or an expiry timer (e.g. this message expires in 12 hours).
efilife 2y ago
Would also be good to display the current date alongside the messages' date
- 2y ago

eth0up 2y ago

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.

frereubu 2y ago

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.

ghosty141 2y ago
> but studies showed that he could remember some things, just not consciously. This reminds me of muscle memory. I can play pieces on the piano even though I don't actively remember the sheet music of them. My hands just "know" what to do. Funnily enough the moment I start actively thinking about certain passages that ability worsens by a lot.
- frereubu 2y ago
  In psychology memory is divided up into various groupings depending on what people are interested in, e.g. explicit (remembering that Paris is the capital of France) and implicit (remembering how to ride a bike). You can further subdivide explicit into semantic (Paris is the capital of France) and episodic (events that you have experienced), and implicit into procedural (how to ride a bike) and emotional conditioning (memories of feelings). Those categories aren't related to neurophysiology though, which is where I think it gets really interesting because I doubt matches those rather Platonic categories.
- mathieuh 2y ago
  Yes same for me on guitar. If I try to play something too slowly or if I really start thinking about what I'm doing it all falls apart. I think that's when you really know a piece, when you can play it incredibly slowly. Paradoxically it's easy to play quickly and just let your fingers play out their muscle memory, playing something really slowly is the challenge.

devwastaken 2y ago

[flagged]

fortran77 2y ago
You come into every thread just to say how we need to get rid of property laws. What does that accomplish?
- rvnx 2y ago
  (not the original poster), a reminder that changing the law is important in many situations and can change real-life impact of people (for example with this tablet, or with blood oxygen feature of Apple) ? If we had truly enforced software patents we wouldn't see widespread LLMs.

sheerun 2y ago

Wonderful idea

albert_e 2y ago

> 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.

zackmorris 2y ago
I've been watching the evolution of the web since 1995, and I remember when css got popular in the late 90s thinking that it didn't match real-world use cases. Somehow design-by-committee took us from drawing our sites with tables in the browser's WYSIWYG editor, to not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have. Css jumped the shark and today I'd vote to scrap it entirely, which I know is a strong and controversial statement. But I grew up with Microsoft Word and Aldus PageMaker, and desktop publishing was arguably better in the 1980s than it is today. Because everyone could use it to get real work done at their family-owned small businesses, long before we had the web or tech support. Why are we writing today's interfaces in what amounts to assembly language? Anyway, I just discovered how float is really supposed to work with shape-outside. Here's an example that can be seen by clicking the Run code snippet button: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33953666 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33953666 Notice how this tiny bit of markup flows like a magazine article. Browsers should have been able to do this from day one. But they were written by unix and PC people, not human interface experts like, say, Bill Atkinson. Just look at how many years it took outline fonts to work using strokes and shadows, so early websites couldn't even place text over images without looking like Myspace. I think that css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements, sort of like with calc() and @media queries (although @media arguably shouldn't exist, because mobile shouldn't be its own thing either). And we should have more powerful typesetting metaphors than justify. Edit: that would adjust font size automatically to fit within a container element. IMHO the original sin of css was that it tried to give everyone a cookie cutter media-agnostic layout tool, when we'd probably be better off with the more intuitive auto flow of Qt, dropping down to a constraint matrix like Apple's Auto Layout when needed. Disclaimer: I'm a backend developer, and watching how much frontend effort is required to accomplish so little boggles my mind.

heopd 2y ago

a commercial product along the same lines is KOMP https://komp.family/en/ 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.

devsda 2y ago
I don't know if it's because we are conditioned by our interaction with TV and mobiles, but active LCD screens feel like they are screaming for our attention and an always on display will mostly be a distraction. E-ink displays don't have this, they just blend in.
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
20£ per month is a pretty steep subscription

headup 2y ago

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.

lbotos 2y ago

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 https://shop.boox.com/products/go6 for my needs as it's a bit cheaper.

speleding 2y ago
When starting Chromium you can pass a `--kiosk` option with one (or more ) URLs of the pages you want to display
matteason 2y ago
I've used https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ https://www.fully-kiosk.com/ on Android tablets before (as meeting room status screens) and that's worked really well
themoonisachees 2y ago
I don't know the specific mechanism used in the OP, but android has several mechanisms that can be used to start an app on reboot. Take a look around a Google search, I'm sure you'll find what you need

OptCohTomo 2y ago

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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05174

D13Fd 2y ago

> 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?)

tekchip 2y ago

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 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.

vanderZwan 2y ago
That's cool, but: > It takes approximately 40 seconds to refresh this display I think that would rule it out for the purpose of this project - the demo in their introduction video[0] shows that it flashes multiple colors for ages during this long refresh. I imagine that could be very confusing for someone whose short-term memory might not last that long. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluopgSoSWY&t=500s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluopgSoSWY&t=500s
- oakesm9 2y ago
  The colour screen have a much slower refresh than the others. The greyscale one I have takes less than a second with minimal flashing.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    Yeah, a black and white version would probably have been fine. Somewhat frustratingly they don't seem to have a 7 inch greyscale one though, only colour versions! Maybe they used to but stopped selling them? EDIT: posted this before I noticed harpastrum's comment
harpastum 2y ago
If you're comfortable with microcontrollers (esp32/arduino), I can definitely recommend Inkplate. I found them when I was making a similar setup for my parents, and they have various sizes up to 10" and up to 6 colors they can display. You can either just get the module, or buy with a battery and mountable case already attached. I think all of the models are also available via Digikey and Mouser if people don't trust random websites. https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/ https://soldered.com/categories/inkplate/

cynicalpeace 2y ago

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.

sheerun 2y ago

btw. you should write date of message on each message, on top of current date

sheerun 2y ago
Why downvotes? For someone with amnesia it is not clear what date message was written if someone has written "today"..

bregma 2y ago

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.

biomcgary 2y ago
Glad she recovered!
- archon810 2y ago
  Yeah, given OP's post, I didn't think this user's comment had a happy ending. That's great.
  - thisOtterBeGood 2y ago
    Yeah, should've lead differently.
    - infermore 2y ago
      i thought "acquired" was a good clue
edarchis 2y ago
That illustrates the difference between anterograde amnesia and dementia. Dementia is a general degradation of the brain that includes memory but you can have amnesia with an otherwise perfectly functional brain. A patient with dementia would never text her kids as in OP's case. Glad that your wife got over it.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  My grandpa had dementia. Last time me and my mom flew over to visit he didn't recognize either of us the first day. He didn't even remember having a daughter. Second day he vaguely recognized my mom but not me. Third and last day of our stay, as soon as I entered the living room he lit up and exclaimed my name. We sat and talked for hours, reminiscing past events with great details, until we had to leave for the plane home.

Miraste 2y ago

"I was concerned about the possibility of e-ink burn-in" Happily, e-ink displays don't suffer from burn-in.

devsda 2y ago
Had the same thought but then I remembered coming across this. Can't say if it is due to burn-in but some manufacturers do recommend refreshing the display image periodically like every 24 hours [1]. See precautions #4 https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/4.2inch_e-Paper_Module_(B)_Manual#Precautions https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/4.2inch_e-Paper_Module_(B)_Ma...
- Miraste 2y ago
  Interesting. Waveshare makes this recommendation across their product line, and from what I can glean from google, their displays really do develop permanent artifacts if they're not refreshed. I've never seen another epaper company say this, and anecdotally I've seen ereaders that held the same image for months or years work perfectly fine, even with no power for refreshes. I don't know why there would be a difference.

jairuhme 2y ago

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.

costcopizza 2y ago

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.

jimbobthemighty 2y ago

Respect

gibolt 2y ago

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.

fortran77 2y ago

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.

creer 2y ago
This is the kind of feedback I was looking for. These are not conditions that we are familiar with - and so the user interface for such things is not necesarily obvious. For example: - I would expect that their and your mom did not forget how to use a web browser when they acquired short term memory issues. So a web browser interface (links, scrolling, buttons) might still be fine. - I was surprised that in the posters' display, the date / time of each msg was not shown. - I was susprised that there is no reminder "Mum, since an operation, you rarely form short term memories." Wouldn't it make sense that even that is not forming a memory? - As you mention, remove the item or mention how it was resolved.

pants2 2y ago

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-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

mvidal01 2y ago

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.

fblp 2y ago

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.

djsavvy 2y ago

Would this work for someone with dementia as well?

hola_hola_hola 2y ago

[dead]

krtab 2y ago

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.

trinsic2 2y ago

This is a great idea. thanks for sharing it. I might need this for myself someday.

admangan 2y ago

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-transcribe-function-on-a-samsung-tablet-d8b908f40262 https://medium.com/@admangan2018/how-to-utilize-the-transcri...

boutell 2y ago

HN does not usually make me cry!

vitorbaptistaa 2y ago

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.

Loughla 2y ago
I would like to second this. I tried a number of options with my grandpa and they always failed for one reason or another. If anyone has a solution in this space, I would be very interested.
zamadatix 2y ago
Is their problem the size (big buttons) or the UI complexity the buttons control (trying to navigate on Netflix is a PITA compared to hitting a preset channel button)? On the former I had luck with one of those jumbo remotes that just has a few buttons (channel up/down, volume up/down, power, mute) and separately programming the TV to only have the channels they cared about in the list. When it came to smart apps it just became impossible to try to fix via the remote as the remote wasn't really the problem.
- vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
  It's the UI, especially for Netflix or other streaming apps. I want something that is totally foolproof. Just click and it starts.
- greentxt 2y ago

observationist 2y ago

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!

Flex247A 2y ago
Not a good idea for someone with memory loss to use an LLM, especially when they are prone to hallucination!

BatmansMom 2y ago

>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?

S04dKHzrKT 2y ago
When you have a site with a fixed, tiny amount of users, I'd opt for HTTP basic auth (via HTTPS). Whether you're using nginx, Traefik, Caddy, etc..., it's very easy to setup. If you're using something like Cloudflare Pages, I would guess you could setup a worker to handle it for you (though I'm not familiar enough with workers to be sure).
- Normal_gaussian 2y ago
  You're right; its easy enough with Cloudflare Workers. They have a sample that is pretty decent: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/basic-auth/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/basic-aut...

Snacklive 2y ago

This is beautiful in ways i can't put into words. Sometimes you find an article that just hits man

te0006 2y ago

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.

froh 2y ago
[flagged]
- matharmin 2y ago
  They did not say it was dementia, and they did not offer care suggestions - they merely shared their own related experience.
- fastball 2y ago
  I do not understand the relevance of the sections you have chosen to highlight here.
- IanCal 2y ago
  Outside of the fact that afaik they didn't, I would think this is intended to anyone who may contact the author as it is a personal blog. This is the comment section on a post shared by someone else as I understand it.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

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.

taurath 2y ago

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.

ronakjain90 2y ago
That's the exact reason we built TRMNL, because your phone is consistently trying to seek your attention (hence distraction). TRMNL helps build personal dashboard without necessarily creating chaos. We built handful of native integrations[1], but you can completely hack it and create your own dashboard with simple HTML content[2]. [1] https://usetrmnl.com/integrations https://usetrmnl.com/integrations [2] https://usetrmnl.com/framework https://usetrmnl.com/framework

throwaway81523 2y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

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 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-copy/ https://soldered.com/product/inkplate-10-9-7-e-paper-board-c...

ronakjain90 2y ago
I think you should also checkout TRMNL. Being engineers ourself security/privacy is of atmost concern, and we follow a similar architecture mentioned above. You could create a private plugin and send in data in the form of REST APIs[1]. You could also use your own webserver by hacking the firmware[2] [1]-https://help.usetrmnl.com/en/articles/9510536-private-plugins https://help.usetrmnl.com/en/articles/9510536-private-plugin... [2]-https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/main/include/config.h#L49 https://github.com/usetrmnl/firmware/blob/main/include/confi...
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  That is an excellent pointer. Thanks!

staub 2y ago

It really is the small things, fun being able to use hacky superpowers like this. makes me want to call my mom :)

kennethh 2y ago

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.

ANarrativeApe 2y ago

"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.

ANarrativeApe 2y ago

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.

ayewo 2y ago
Although this is a PC-centric way of explaining the difference between Dementia and Anterograde Amnesia, I really like it nonetheless :)

dredmorbius 2y ago

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.

swyx 2y ago
lovely note thank you. i checked out Boox and it seems to all be sold out - any ideas how to get one (or a good enough alternative) today?
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Sorry, no idea what Onyx's inventory status / fulfillment time is. I'd bought mine a few years back through their online store. Arrived in a few days as I recall. <https://onyxboox.com/product#actual https://onyxboox.com/product#actual> Onyx refresh their offerings frequently, though older models typically still sell for a while. You might be between offerings. You can also likely buy used from online sales sites (e.g., Craigslist, eBay).

consultSKI 2y ago

Priceless! Well done Jan. Thank you for sharing this amazing project.

pathikrit 2y ago

Cool! Btw, I make this: https://framed.news/ https://framed.news/ framed e-ink news display

GTP 2y ago

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.

HenryBemis 2y ago

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

lacoolj 2y ago

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?

low_tech_punk 2y ago

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.

dewarrn1 2y ago

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. 0: https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia

mud_dauber 2y ago

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.

causality0 2y ago

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.

brionsr 2y ago

Hello mom.

more_corn 2y ago

This gives me hope in humanity. This is using tech to humanize.