A Digital Home for the People You Love

Well, welcome to Boomers Today. I’m your host, Frank Sampson. Of course, each week bring important and very useful information on issues they see baby boomers, their parents and other loved ones.

And as I do each and every show, I thank all of you, and I thank all of you because our listeners are growing each and every day and have been for many years because of you. You have shared particular our entire podcast series with family and friends, sometimes individual shows that you share with family and friends, and that’s why our listeners are growing. So many of you listen you know on various podcast stations, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Autumn Ball, or you just say ask. You could just ask Aluxe and Siri to take you to Boomers Today, and of course you can always go to our website at Boomerstodayradio dot com.

And I know why we’re getting so many listeners, So I know that for sure it’s because we have wonderful guests and very educational and I’m not going to disappoint you today because we have with us Tyler Zanini, Tyler pronounce your last We got a look at that, Tyler. Yeah. So. Tyler is the co founder of Memory Board with a background in healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship.

Tyler created memory Board alongside his father in law, David, after seeing firsthand how hard it can be to care for loved ones with memory loss. Together, they’re on a mission to make aging in place easier, safer, and more connected. So Tyler, thank you so much for joining us on Boomers today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much. Frank really appreciate the invitation. Yeah. So, you know, maybe we get to start out, and it’s a great story, So let’s start out.

I’d love to hear more about your experiences and how memory boards started, and then we’ll get into this more more specific Yeah. Absolutely. So memory Board started from just personal family. Experience, wanting a really simple way to communicate and stay in touch with our loved ones facing memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer’s.

In my case, it was with my grandmother who’s had vascular dementia for five years. My father in law, David, his mom had Alzheimer’s for over fifteen years before she passed away, and as the years went by, it just became harder and harder to communicate, share updates, keep in touch, stay connected. And memory Board is a really simple tool that you know, we say is really no burden or low burden for the loved one. To kind of keep in touch with them.

So memory Board is a digital display that would sit in your loved ones home and through an app on your phone, you can send reminders, messages, updates all throughout the day from anywhere in the world. So people love the fact that you can send a simple reminder or a simple check in, or you can share a daily planner and a daily agenda with your loved one. And as a result, it’s giving a little bit it’s giving everybody a little bit more peace of mind. You know, there’s less repetitive questions, less phone calls asking what’s happening, kind of what’s going on today, but also a feeling of you know, hey, my son or daughter is checking in with me more, I know what’s kind of going on.

I’m seeing the photos with the additional context of a memory that’s going to happen in the past week or so. So there’s all these kind of stories of connections that we’re really hearing from families every single day. The last thing I’ll say is we started the company in twenty twenty four, launched it middle of last year, and you know today we’re now serving thousands of families across the country as well as around the world, and every day we’re hearing from them about how it’s keeping them connected and some of the stories that we’re hearing. So give us, h you know, a picture in a sense.

I know we’re yes somewhere listening to this on audio, of course, but give us your own picture and how it looks. So if you were to send a message on your phone to someone who has a phone, Uh, that’s one thing. How is how does this differ? What’s the actual technology being used? What’s the size? Yes, give us a picture of all that? Yeah, absolutely, So imagine a simple screen. So we have two sizes that we have today.

One is a ten inch display, which is about the size of a tablet, so imagine kind of an iPad or tablet size. And then the second one is a fifteen inch display, which is kind of a large laptop monitor, small kind of TV monitor, And it would be always plugged into power, always connected to Wi Fi. And fore your loved one, they don’t need to touch it. They don’t need to manage it.

It goes to sleep on its own in the evening, it comes on on the morning, and the goal is that they just kind of need to look at it throughout the day. So there’s really nothing that they need to kind of manage themselves. There’s no apps, there’s no power button, there’s no you know, turning things on or turning our words. Is the messages exactly, you know, or photos as well, because you can do photos as well.

You do it photos. So they just need to look at it throughout the day. And then from the app, family members, friends, caregivers can go into the app at any point throughout the day, enter in a nice message, enter a reminder. You know, hey mom, make sure you’re drinking plenty of water.

Hey mom, I’ll be there in ten minutes. You know, can’t wait to see you. We’re going to go out to lunch today. Hey mom, there’s an activity going on, you know in the community room today.

This you might be interested in kind of doing this or kind of going and checking this out. So I think what we call we kind of have this concept of the care circle where you can have an unlimited number of people in the care circle giving them the ability to send messages and reminders to your loved one’s memory board. So let’s say you somebody sends a message, the son, the daughter then sends a message, the spouse sends a message, and let’s say that all happens within an hour. How is it scrolling? Accept Exactly right.

So one of the things that people you know, really appreciate about the memory board is just the simplicity and the ease of use. The other way we kind of thought about it is we’re kind of digitizing the sticky note or digitizing the whiteboard that so many of us, we while providing care have become accustomed to. The beauty of the memory board is at any one time, there’s only one thing, you know, one message, one note. We limit any one note to one hundred and forty characters, which is about twenty to thirty five words, So there’s only one thing ever being shown on the memory board, and it’s you know, it fills the screen.

So the font is as big as it can possibly be depending on the length of the message. But to your point, if there are. Multiple they’ll kind of rotate and alternate between all the active posts, and then within the app. You can also schedule things to kind of start and stop at different times.

So the goal with memory Board and kind of what we hoped in terms of how we designed it and how it’s being used is it’s really a tool for ongoing communication where every day there’s kind of something new going on and you’re kind of constantly sharing updates and sharing check ins and you know, maybe there’s a weekly reminder that’s there kind of every you know, Wednesday from eight to ten, things like that are kind of coming and going, and oh, you know, the goal is really the fact that you can kind of schedule so with the scheduling and you know, the goal is really ongoing communication with the memory board where there’s kind of constantly updates, constantly things coming in and out, whether that is you know, sharing an update that’s going on between the family, or helping your mom, your dad, your grandparent kind of know what’s going on with their schedule and you know what they have kind of coming up, right. So I’d love to know, even doing a little while now, what your experience, what what what do you What have you learned that you didn’t really realize since launch? Yeah? And what adjustments said you made if any at all. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think the key thing is.

I always just come back to this point of simplicity and really focusing on doing one thing. Really really well. And that’s you know, kind of one’s primarily one way communication, you know, and and kind of the messaging aspect. I think because.

A lot of people have thought about designing technology for older adults, and I think the bride the Facebook portal for example, where you know, it’d be great if we can kind of use a Facebook portal and kind of do video calls with our loved ones, but that kind of had your loved one needed to kind of know how to turn that on and off and what buttons to press, and it kind of created a bit of a headache. I don’t know if anybody’s had a really great experience who went down that path of trying to incorporate the Facebook portal. So that’s really kind of our key learning is everything we do needs to be with simplicity in mind. And then the other kind of thing that we’re learning, which is you know, what we’re getting we’re gaining a better appreciation for, is that everything should be anything where any new feature we’re adding should ultimately be optional for families, because we hear from a lot of families and they say, hey, we love the memory board how it is.

You know, we don’t want you to change anything. But then we have other families who say, oh, I would love if you could have a confirmation button that my loved one can pressed to confirm they’ve seen the message. So there are things that we’re continuing. To add and enhancements, nothing that’s going to be too far outside of what we’re currently doing today, which is that kind of communication system and messaging system.

But then making everything optional so that it’s up to the user to say, oh, this could be helpful for me, but you know, for somebody else they could say, hey, this this isn’t going to be a helpful feature or helpful enhancement to the product. So you know, listen to all of us text probably too much during the day, right, yeah, So at what point is it you’re feeling what you’ve heard from family, is that mom or dad just not they don’t look at their phone, all right, they don’t text all right? So but if they do and there’s still and there’s you know, elderly people who do it and works well, and I’m sure that in that case, they just use their phone. But at what point do you think in there, if they have dementia, if they have you know, cognitive some sort of cognitive impairment, at what point do you think memory board would be a good fit. Yeah for that family, Yeah, I think back to your kind of previous question.

I think one of the things that we’ve been kind of surprised about is just the range of people who can benefit from memory Board. We even have you know, caregivers and families who are using it for themselves to remind themselves of kind of the most important thing that’s kind of going on each day. I think we all have that experience where when you’re getting you know, sometimes hundreds of texts every single day, it very quickly becomes hard to kind of figure out what is the most important thing, or you know, you don’t want to kind of pull out your phone every five minutes to check your calendar and kind of see what’s coming up next. But I would say in the context of you know, the loved one kind of older adults that we’re working with, we see a lot of things.

I mean, even those who have a cell phone today, oftentimes it’s you know, in a couch cushion, maybe it’s not charged. A lot of people tell us that, you know, they’re a loved one forgets to hang up the call, the prior call that they’re on, so the phone is just on and they’re not able to kind of reach their loved one. So a lot of families tell us that they’ll use the memory board to say, you know, hey, Mom, I’ve been trying to call you, you know, kind of you give me a call back when you can, like I want to you want to talk. So we actually see that quite a bit.

For people who do have their phone, a lot of times it’s it’s out of reach or they’re not able to get it in there, and their loved one is not able to to get a hold of so they’re using the memory board in that context. And certainly for those who you know no longer. Can use a phone. I think one of the other kind of amazing things that we’ve seen is we get a lot of people reach out to us for things outside of memory loss specifically, so you know, families with loved ones with Parkinson’s, loved ones with ADHD autism, even children who don’t yet have a cell phone as well.

We’re seeing all these kind of different use cases come to us and say, hey, we can see a lot of benefit in the memory board for our family, and they’re you know, they’re kind of coming to us getting a memory board and telling us how how helpful it’s been for their situation. Yeah, so what’s your mission? Well, what’s your what’s your hope, what’s your plan here? Yeah? Absolutely, I mean for us, it’s really all about helping older adults stay connected. You know, we we would love to kind of see memory board help people age and play, live a little bit more independently and just provide a little just provide everybody a little bit more kind of peace of mind and connection. I think that’s kind of the most amazing thing is the feeling that the stories that we hear from families where they tell us that their loved one says that they don’t feel so lonely anymore because of the memory board, that they’re able to attend more events because of the memory board, that it’s reducing a little bit of that kind of caregiver burden and kind of caregiver guilt, that feeling that you know you can’t be there twenty four to seven, you know you’re kind of bringing that gap a little bit with the memory board.

So that’s kind of the most amazing kind of things that we hear from families is it’s kind of providing a little bit of that kind of peace of mind. And you know, on top of that, I mean, we’re just really grateful that families are trusting us and you know, letting us be a small part of their caregiving journey. So if if the particular senior, let’s say, wants to get a message to the family, memory board is not the vehicle for that. Yeah, So we are adding like a confirmation button, you know that they can kind of confirm that they’ve seen the message, and that’ll kind of come in handy for let’s say there’s a really important message you want to make sure that your loved one has seen.

They can kind of confirm, you know, where they are kind of responding back with full messages. Yeah, yeah, okay, good good. So I know you mentioned about a reminder of an activity or something which tells me that this isn’t just technology that could be used at home, but it could be in their new home, which could be an assisted living Yes, so location, et cetera. So I talk to us about that is that are you getting good response from assisted living locations or there to help support this technology.

Yeah. Absolutely, And we are in a lot of assisted living, I mean hundreds, if not thousands at this point of a different assisted living locations, primarily through the families that are purchasing it for their loved ones and. A lot of times memory board. A lot of times it’s families.

It’s loved ones who are moving into a new location and for the family they’re saying, you know, hey, like my mom is always moving into assistant living or into memory care, and you know what’s a helpful tool that’s out there that we can help us communicate just a little bit more, you know, maybe a little bit like we did, you know, when she was at her home for example. So it is ultimately the families and kind of the caregivers buying purchasing it and setting it up for their mom and dad oftentimes when they’re moving into a new location. But we have gotten very positive feedback from the care staff and people who are you know, part of the assistant living and independent living organizations as well. I think one they’re just they’re first super curious when they see it.

They’re like oh what is this. This is super interesting. I would love to have this in all of my residence apartments. So they’re very very positive when they first see it, and then when they kind of start to see how it’s helpful, they kind of realize it’s a really good ongoing tool.

Whether that’s for a prompting mechanism to say, oh, look your daughter. You know, your daughter’s coming by today it says she’s going to be here at twelve thirty on the memory board, or you know, there’s a photo and then the photo says, you know, oh this is from you know, your great granddaughter’s birthday party last Saturday. You know, look how much fun everybody’s having. And maybe there’s a tag that says who each person in the photo is.

So the care staff can kind of use it as a prompting mechanism. But we’re also seeing situations where the care staff is using it to communicate to multiple residents as well, again to kind of communicate the daily planner, the daily agenda, different kind of activities that are going on within within the facility. Right, great, So Tyler, we’re going to take a quick break. I promise, just a quick one, just to recognize our sponsor when we come back, certainly give you the opportunity to share with our listeners how they could learn more about memory board and how they can get it and all of that, whatever you’d like to share, and then I’d love for you to maybe talk to us.

I’ll give you some time to think about it. Here about thirty seconds. Just maybe some stories, some great stories of families that you’re working with. That’s always good to hear.

All right, awesome, So my question to all of you is do you have to know anyone who may be concerned about an older driver well? Senior care authorities Beyond Driving with Dignity program is a facilitated self assessment program for older drivers. This program has been designed to serve as a vital tool to facilitate older drivers and their families as they make appropriate decisions regarding the future of one safe driving career. If the individual is a safe driver, an advisor will provide him or her with strategies on how to remain a safe driver as they progress through the aging process. If driving retirement is the appropriate decision, then the individual and their family are offered possible alternatives, resources, and a specific plan to ensure a smooth and successful transition from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat.

So to learn more, you can go to www dot Beyond Driving with Dignity dot com. That’s beyond Driving with Dignity dot Com to connect with a senior care authority advisor in your area. So we’re back with Tyler Zanini, who’s the co founder of memory Board. Some very unique and very interesting and exciting technologies.

So Tyler, go ahead, tell our listeners a little bit more, you know, how they can learn more and if they’re interested in getting memory Board, and I’ll turn it over to you. Yeah, absolutely, So you can learn more on our website memory board dot com. You know, there we have a bunch of information. You can kind of learn more about the features.

Read about the two different sizes we have the ten point one inch memory board and the fifteen point six inch memory board. Read some of the reviews that we’ve received from from families that are using it today and how they’re using it as well. And I would say and on our website as well, we typically have a promo code there as well, so you can kind of get a little bit off, a little bit of a discount on the price as well. And then We have a lot of information on Instagram and our YouTube channel.

Both are at memory board app app. You can kind of find us there as well and reach out to us. You know, we’re always we’re very hands on team. We’re very supportive.

So if you have a question or a comment, you know, give us an email or a call just at hello at memoryboard dot com. So happy to answer questions. Great, perfect, So you got it. You know, you’ve been doing it not too long, but you’ve gained a lot of traction here and probably have some some stories, some pretty great stories to tell any you could share with us.

Yeah, absolutely, And that’s really the best part of working on memory board is the stories that we hear from families pretty much every single day. You know, at this point we kind of hear a story from a family about how it’s helping them stay connected, helping their loved one, how you know, the just how helpful it’s been. A lot of times, I think people are surprised about just how helpful memory board is. Whether it’s that the that their loved one is looking at it throughout the day, that their loved one is attending more events because of memory Board.

I think one that kind of stands out from the past week is of somebody reached out to us and they had set up their memory board for their mom and I think their mom was basically her Their mom’s best friend was the mom’s neighbor for forty fifty years. And the mom is has dementia. She’s kind of getting, you know, worse as the years go by, and has been losing touch with her neighbor, you know, who was her best friend. And on the memory board, the daughter said, you know, hey, Mom, why don’t you call Why don’t you call your neighbor.

You know, she she’d really be excited if you gave her a call, and you know, you guys talked and and she did, you know, the mom called her neighbor, which she hadn’t talked to in a number of years, and you know, and the daughter said she would not have done that without kind of the notification on the memory board and kind of suggesting to her that, hey, why don’t you give your your best friend a call and uh, you know, let her know you’re thinking about her, have her conversation with her. And then afterwards, the neighbor called the daughter and was just elated, like was just so happy that her friend called her and they had a conversation, and how great it was to reminisce and and to kind of relive old memories, and just how happy it had made her that her best friend from so many years had kind of given her a call and had a conversation. So it’s kind of stories like that that have just really really kind of touching in terms of helping families stay connected. I like to address that, Yeah, all right, you know, we’ll could talk about and others you may have.

But as you know, and you’ve been through it personally, pardon me, is that when someone starts to develop, you know, some form of dementia and been diagnosed with some form of dementia, whether it’s Alzheimer’s or another type, it’s common, unfortunately, that friends start to they’re not comfortable in the in those situations, they don’t know how to act to their friend who has been diagnosed, and and it’s just it’s unfortunate, but it’s common. I could see, and maybe even in the case you just brought up, that maybe that friend would be a little more comfortable sending that message versus having to sit in the room with their friend and be uncomfortable on what to say, how to say it, how to react situations where they’re maybe that seniors asking questions over and over again or whatever. Again, they’re just uncomfortable with that situation. So would you agree? And and and and is that you know if you ever heard that from families? Yeah, absolutely right, And I think that applies as well.

You know we’ve heard that from you know, the person with memory loss as well, where sometimes you know they’re they’re kind of self conscious where you know, they don’t want to be asked a question that they don’t know the answer to, but kind of hearing things over memory board bridges that gap a little bit as well, where you know, you’re kind of providing these check ins, but there’s not that that kind of like uh uncertainty, right that I’m going to be asked something or something, somebody is going to say something and I’m not going to have a response, and and and you know people are not going to be comfortable. Yeah, anything else come to mind? And yeah, yeah, absolutely. Another one from this kind of past week, which is I I would say a little bit more uh just the kind of tactical, kind of practical sense. Is a woman kind of was telling us how every morning.

So I think what we see a. Lot of times, and I think this is natural in today’s day and is people kind of live all over the place, you know, across the country. So one of the things that your memory board is really good at is helping everybody, all the you know, sons and daughters right of your parents kind of participate in the care regardless of if you’re ten minutes away or you know, a six hour plane ride away. So that’s kind of one of the things we’ve.

Seen where I was talking to a when earlier this week where every morning she reminds her mom to put on her compression socks and make sure that she’s wearing her compression socks. And early on when she got the memory board, the mom and Francis is a little bit to your point of using a phone. Every morning when she saw that message, she would call her daughter and say, Hey, don’t worry, I’m wearing my compression socks. Like I’m you know, I got ready for the day.

I have my compression socks on, you know, thank you for the reminder. And so this woman was kind of like she would appreciate it, she was glad that she was doing it. But every day she was getting a phone called that her mom was wearing her compression socks. Eventually that kind of went away and she kept wearing her compression socks.

But it’s kind of little reminders like that, whether it’s the compression socks, whether it’s drinking your water, going out for your morning walk. It’s kind of those simple reminders to make sure that we’re all practicing the right kind of healthy daily habits. That’s great. That’s great.

So you know, I don’t want to finalize this podcast, and then you’re thinking, boy, I wish Frank would have asked me this, or I wish you would have asked me this. We have a couple of minutes, so I’m gonna I’m gonna turn over you and just any words of wisdom or points that you’d like to make to our listeners that maybe I didn’t bring up. Yeah, I mean I would say, you know, I think the. Again, like first and foremost, I think we’re just very you know, just grateful that families are trusting us, and you know we’re kind of able to help them and kind of support them and be a very small kind of piece of what they’re doing.

But I think the other thing that I’ve really kind of appreciated is just how like people have been very kind and positive and supportive, and we are we started this. We launched the product about eight months ago at this point, so we’re still a fairly new company, although we’ve been around for a couple of months and have had some some good experience under our belts. But just the fact that families will share with us what they would like to see next and how we can improve the product. So we’ve just been really.

It’s just we’ve been amazed by how positive people have been, you know, both about you know, some of the best emails we can get our people who say, hey, I wish it did this, but I love the product and here’s how it’s helping me, and you know, it’s been a great tool for us. Like I think those are the best emails because you know, people kind of see, we know that it’s helping them, and we know that we can make it better, and that’s ultimately for us, the goal is continuing to make memory Board better and better so we can better support families. Great, great, well, it’s great, Great what you’re doing. The thing I like about it from what I’ve seen and what i’ve heard it’s simple, right, It’s it’s exactly right, it’s easy to install, it’s not complicated.

So congratulations on all of that, all. Right, Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I think that’s the keep it. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us, Tyler.

I really appreciate it. And we’ll have you Mandl and you want to see you have a little a little more time on your belt and more. Mean, thank you everybody. Please be safe out there and we’ll stop to everybody next week.

You’ve been listening to Boomers Today with Frank Sampson. To learn more about today’s show, visit and join us next time for another edition of Boomers Today.