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Reimagining Caregiving Through Story and Connection
- Hannah Ngọc-Hân Đào
- Mar 23
- 5 min read
Introduction
Caregiving is often treated as a checklist of quantified tasks, such as medications administered, appointments attended, and symptoms recorded. As a result, traditional care services tend to overlook the relational and historical context of patients’ lived reality, which can gradually erode their sense of personal history and identity.
Maetri is a healthcare technology company built around this insight. With the support of AI tools, its goal is to transform caregiving into an evolving story that preserves a patient’s identity. Our team partnered with Maetri’s founder and CEO, Brock Dubbels, to envision core features of a platform that could support this human-centered approach to care.
Team
Emma Constable
Lead UX Researcher
Jon Ebueng
Lead UX Researcher
Hannah Ngọc-Hân Đào
UX Researcher
Methodology
Since Maetri is an early-stage product, we followed an exploratory research process focused on understanding the core problems, uncovering opportunities, and proposing a viable direction for the company.
Discover
We began by conducting discovery interviews with Brock as our subject matter expert to understand Maetri’s motivations and build foundational knowledge around caregiving and genealogy (the study of family history).
Market Research
We complemented discovery with competitive analyses and SWOT analyses to identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities across existing caregiving and health-tech platforms.
Feature Exploration
Informed by our research insights, we ideated potential product directions and features to address Maetri’s goals in a differentiated way.
Concept Refinement
We synthesized our ideas into a hypothetical mobile platform and made it tangible with a low-fidelity prototype.
Planned User Research & Evaluation
Our intended next phase would involve conducting interviews and usability testing with caregivers and older adults in long-term care to evaluate our assumptions and refine our concept based on real, lived experiences.
Discovery Insights
As our first step, we followed the GRITS interview framework (Goals, Review, Ideas, Testing, Steps) to structure our early discovery conversations with Brock.
In defining the problem space, we uncovered the following core insights:
Long-term care for diagnoses such as dementia, chronic illness, or conditions requiring prolonged hospitalization, can gradually erode a person’s sense of self and connection to their personal and family history. | While caregivers play a central role in supporting patients, they often lack tools that enable meaningful connection. | This gap is especially pronounced for older adults experiencing memory loss and for caregivers supporting individuals with cognitive decline or long-term conditions. |
When reviewing existing approaches, we identified patterns in what has and hasn’t worked:
Tools centered on emotional storytelling, collaborative family trees, and prompts paired with voice or photo capture are effective in preserving personal narratives. | Although powerful for keeping records, full-service genealogy platforms are research-heavy and not as well suited for real-time interaction patients and caregivers. |
In addition to our GRITS interviews, we conducted a stakeholder mapping exercise to clarify the people with direct or indirect influence on this project, including key figures in later phases of user research and testing.
Market Research
To better understand where Maetri can meaningfully differentiate from existing services, we conducted a broad competitive analysis of 25 services across genealogy, storytelling, media (e.g., voice capture, photo, video), therapeutic reminiscence, family connection, and memory/archival preservation.
In this initial analysis, we identified each product or service’s core purpose and target market, primary features, data and privacy models, and the level of interaction supported between different users. This broad initial scan helped us identify patterns in how concepts like memory and family history are currently being addressed.
From there, we narrowed our focus to six representative competitors and conducted deeper SWOT analyses (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to evaluate how each might compete with, complement, or substitute Maetri’s emerging value proposition.
For-profit, genealogy company with a large network of historical record databases, family-tree tools, and DNA-testing services.
Free genealogy resource providing access to genealogical records, a collaborative family tree, research tools, and educational content.
Platform designed to preserve personal narratives by turning prompted voice recordings into a physical keepsake book
Activity-based software for use in sessions by caregivers including electronic life records, multi-media games, and sensory activities
Interactive memory app that preserves users’ stories through audio recording for loved ones to hear in the future
Nonprofit dedicated to recording, preserving, and sharing personal narratives to create an oral history of America
Nonprofit platform for people to collectively curate local histories via photos, stories, and audio recordings pinned to a map
Three categorizations of these competitors emerged through our SWOT analyses:
Direct Competitors
While powerful for documentation, these tools offer limited storytelling capabilities and are not designed to support connection in care contexts.
Indirect Competitors
These platforms excel at capturing narratives and emotion but are typically episodic rather than ongoing, and do not connect storytelling to caregiving.
Replacements
These more informal tools allow for memory-sharing and connection but lack the structure and intentionality needed to support deeper engagement in care-specific contexts.
No existing solution effectively bridges genealogy, caregiving, and emotional storytelling.
As a result, we recommended that the value proposition of Maetri be to transform genealogy into a more dynamic narrative that supports caregiving, preserves patient identity, and encourages reciprocal storytelling rather than mere documentation.
Concept Exploration
With a clear understanding of the competitive landscape, we shifted into exploring potential features, with the goal of using our market research insights to guide rather than constrain our ideation.
We ideated a range of app-based features for the Maetri platform and converged on three concrete concepts that together address both practical and emotional needs:
| A dynamic, interactive family tree paired with a timeline that situates patients’ stories and life events in context. | Unlike traditional genealogy tools, this feature emphasizes lived experience and relational history over mere record-keeping. |
| Real-time, AI-supported prompts designed to help caregivers hold meaningful conversations with patients. | These prompts would adapt to context and emotional cues, as well as become more personalized over time based on inputs from the resulting conversations. |
| Auto - or manually generated bundles of stories, photos, voice recordings, and music to leverage music’s strong connection to memory and emotion. | These capsules are designed to be revisited, shared, and added to over time reinforcing identity and personal history |
App Prototype
To bring these ideas into a tangible form, we created and iterated a low-fidelity, interactive prototype using Figma Make. The goal of the prototype was to explore potential structure, organization, and how to integrate AI support in caregiving conversations.
The prototype centers on an AI-assisted app designed to help caregivers guide positive, meaningful conversations, and is organized around three primary sections:
Overview: Patient or user profile including key insights from past conversations, preferred topics, caregiver notes, emotional cues, and curated memory capsules.
Memories: Growing memory library comprising a visual family tree, timeline organized by life stages, and “capsules” or collections of meaningful moments.
Conversations: Live conversation space where caregivers receive AI-assisted prompts and emotional feedback to help guide supportive and engaging conversations.
Conclusion
This project pushed our team to research and ideate in an intentionally open-ended context. Without an existing product to iterate on, we focused on understanding caregiving as a human, relational experience rather than a transactional sequence of tasks, and used that insight to propose a viable product direction for Maetri.
Our proposed concept is an early exploration, so the next step would be to put it in front of real users. Future work would include conducting empathy interviews with important stakeholders identified during discovery, including caregivers, older adults, patients in long-term care, and family members to:
Gain more insights based on real lived experiences,
Evaluate the assumptions underlying our feature concepts, and
Run usability tests with the prototype to discover which aspects resonate, which parts are confusing, and which areas should receive focus in future development
We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Brock and learn so much about a domain we had little prior knowledge about! Especially for us as researchers with the goal of maximizing empathy in user experience, this work reinforced the value of designing caregiving tools that honor the stories, relationships, history, and identities of the people at the center of care.
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