Bronze Digital Product Design · 2025
Alz Well Dementia Caregiving Ecosystem
by Akhil Patel
- A' Design Award 2025 Bronze Winner in Digital Product Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: Akhil Patel Designs
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 26,016
- Verification code 81769C74C7 · Verify this award
About Alz Well Dementia Caregiving Ecosystem
Alz Well is a digital care system for dementia caregivers and patients. The system includes a caregiver application with a dark mode for night use, a smart band with simple voice and one-tap controls, and a smart speaker with a large screen. Location tracking helps caregivers find patients who wander. Central scheduling with automated suggestions supports daily routines, and a wellness dashboard shows the state of patient and caregiver. Familiar voice options and contextual images help patients recall memories. Several dementia care needs are addressed in one system.
Akhil Patel's Alz Well Dementia Caregiving Ecosystem addresses the complex challenge of remote dementia care through thoughtful digital interface design that balances urgent alert communication with routine status monitoring, creating a comprehensive caregiving support system that acknowledges both the practical demands and emotional dimensions of assisting individuals with cognitive impairment. The work demonstrates sophisticated understanding of user experience principles tailored to caregiving contexts where information hierarchy directly impacts response effectiveness and where visual design carries significant emotional weight during moments of concern or reassurance. The compositional achievement lies in the careful orchestration of four distinct interface states that together illustrate the breadth of caregiving scenarios, from critical emergency detection requiring immediate intervention to calm confirmation of wellness permitting relaxation, with intermediate alert states offering graduated response options that respect caregiver judgment and autonomy. The chromatic strategy reveals particular accomplishment in its restraint and psychological sensitivity, deploying warm urgent hues (coral-red for emergency calls, golden-yellow for cautionary water detection) only when action is genuinely required, while establishing calm through cooler teal-green wellness confirmation and professional through the forest green accent color that unifies positive state interfaces and the compact dashboard widget. The typographic treatment demonstrates exceptional legibility through generous scale and careful weight selection, recognizing that caregivers may encounter these interfaces during moments of stress when cognitive load is elevated and rapid comprehension essential. The integration of human imagery through avatar circles personalizes what might otherwise feel like clinical monitoring technology, reinforcing that the system serves human relationships and that caregiving remains fundamentally interpersonal even when mediated by digital tools. The interface architecture suggests awareness of diverse caregiver populations who may possess varying levels of technical proficiency, employing familiar mobile conventions (bottom navigation, card-based content, touch-friendly button sizing) while introducing specialized functionality thoughtfully. The narrative progression across the four screens implies a temporal journey from crisis through assessment to resolution, though the widget demonstrates that routine monitoring occurs continuously as background awareness supporting caregiver peace of mind. The work engages with significant contemporary concerns surrounding aging populations, the challenges of dementia care particularly when families are geographically dispersed, the potential for technology to extend caregiving capacity without replacing human presence and judgment, and the ethical dimensions of monitoring vulnerable individuals while respecting dignity and autonomy. The design suggests consultation with caregiving communities and medical professionals, evidenced by the specificity of monitored parameters (fall detection through wearable devices, water flow audio monitoring suggesting bathroom safety concerns, medication compliance tracking, vital sign integration, location awareness) that reflect actual dementia care priorities and common caregiver anxieties. The reassurance messaging demonstrates emotional intelligence, acknowledging caregiver stress and explicitly offering permission to relax when monitoring indicates wellness, recognizing that caregiving often involves sustained vigilance that technology can help modulate. One might consider how such interfaces reshape the experience of caregiving across distance, whether they primarily serve to reduce anxiety or potentially introduce new forms of alert fatigue, how they balance comprehensive monitoring against privacy considerations, and what it means for vulnerable individuals to be continuously tracked even when such monitoring serves protective purposes, inviting reflection on how technology mediates care relationships and whether digital tools can genuinely support the profound human dimensions of accompanying someone through cognitive decline.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- AlzWell includes a caregiver app with dark mode for night use, a smart band for patients with simple voice and one-tap interactions, and a smart speaker with a large screen for voice commands and viewing memories. Key features: AI location tracking for wandering patients, central scheduling with AI suggestions, custom voice options for familiarity, and a wellness dashboard for caregivers. Patients gain confidence with contextual visuals, and the system simplifies caregiver-patient management.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- App: Responsive iOS devices (iPhone SE - iPhone 16Pro Max)
Wearable: 36mm diagonal rectangular display
Speaker: 10.2in diagonal display (1.8in depth) - Tags
- Dementia, Alzheimer's, Monitoring, Mobile, Caregivers, SmartDevices, Voice, AI
- Production Technology
- For the app: The product was designed in Figma. The animations are done in Rive/SwiftUI. The v1 prototype is built specifically for iOS using Swift UI and UIKit with some parts done in React. The voice interactions and routing are done via a Large Language Model (LLM).
Wearable & Speaker: V2 additions to the ecosystem are designed in Figma and will be built on open-source libraries. - Design Challenge
- The most difficult part of this challenge was to create something that had zero learning curve for the dementia patient (achieved via voice and one-click UI) and build a comprehensive monitoring system for the caregiver while integrating their current daily routine into the caregiving workflow.
- Project Duration
- Initial research and design: 6 months (May 2022 - Jul 2022)
Development: Ongoing
Location: San Francisco, CA - Operation Flow
- Alz Well is the first system designed for both dementia caregivers and patients, improving both lives. It uses AI for wandering tracking and time management, a breakthrough in dementia care. Unlike other solutions that address one issue at a time, Alz Well manages multiple dementia challenges in one system (wandering, reminiscence, home tasks, monitoring). The tech is invisible to the patient, requiring no learning curve, making it effortless to use for both patients and caregivers.
- Research
- The research was divided into 2 parts:
1. User research: I talked to 3 dementia patients' family members and caregivers to understand how their lives and daily schedules are affected while caregiving.
2. Desk Research: Extensive secondary research was done from online sources like the CDC website, caregiving.org, Alz.org, etc. - Inspiration
- Dementia caregivers are the worst-hit caregivers in the healthcare industry:
- 17 billion hours of unpaid care (mostly family)
- 60% have extreme stress levels
- 1/6 quit their jobs
Dementia is also the most expensive disease in the USA: 2.8 Trillion USD estimated societal cost by 2030.
Alz Well aims to reduce stress for caregivers by helping them:
- effectively managing the symptoms & well-being of the patient
- having a smart care framework at their fingertips
- manage their day-to-day schedules along with the caregiving responsibility using AI
- get help in emergencies