Research
Making Meaningful Responses More Visible
As dementia progresses, responses can become quieter, less predictable, and harder to recognize. Memcara’s research asks how technology can help caregivers notice those responses, understand what they may reveal, and carry that knowledge forward.
Since 2022, Memcara has collaborated with Dartmouth College’s Empower Lab and Thayer School of Engineering to study how session video, transcripts, caregiver observations, and collaborative tools can support a more complete, person-specific understanding of someone living with dementia.
The research is not simply about whether someone participated. It examines how meaningful responses can become more visible and how what one caregiver learns can become useful to families, staff, and future caregivers.
Two Peer-Reviewed Publications
Family In The Loop
Enabling Family Involvement and Person-Centered Dementia Care at Long-Term Care Facilities with Collaborative AI Tools
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW, 2025
This research examines how collaborative tools can help families contribute person-specific knowledge and participate more meaningfully in care while supporting communication between families and professional caregivers.
CareInsights
AI-Enabled Infrastructure for Person-Centered Dementia Care in Resource-Constrained Facilities
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2025
This research explores how information gathered through care interactions can be preserved, organized, and made useful across caregivers, roles, and shifts, particularly in long-term-care environments with limited resources.
400+ research sessions
203 annotated session videos
2 peer-reviewed publications
How the research informs Memcara
This research has helped shape CareSuite™ and provides the foundation for the next generation of CareInsights™, now in development.
CareInsights is being designed to bring observations together across repeated sessions, identify meaningful patterns and changes, and generate human-reviewed insights that can help caregivers and families carry what has been learned forward.
The goal is not to replace caregiver judgment. It is to make meaningful responses easier to recognize and person-specific knowledge easier to preserve and share.
Why Memcara Uses Music, Imagery, and Conversation
Familiar music can support attention, emotion, reminiscence, movement, and social interaction. Memcara pairs music with meaningful imagery, narration, and gentle conversational guidance so that participation does not depend on memory recall or words alone.