“Meco gives our family one place to remember what helped, what made Mum smile, and what we should bring up next time.”
A caregiver using Meco
MAKE IT THEIRS
Nine themes. One Meco.
Not a color swap — paper tone, ink, accent and contrast change together, everywhere: this site, sign-in, the caregiver console, patient mode. Two are built specifically for low vision or light sensitivity.
QUICK ANSWERS
Before you dive into a whole chapter
Does someone need to be tech-savvy to run this?
Day to day, no — enroll a person, open Patient mode, read the report. Getting it running the first time currently means a caregiver pasting a few provider keys into a settings file. The Pricing chapter walks through exactly what that involves.
What does the person being cared for actually see?
A camera, a warm hello when someone familiar walks in, and — if they want it — a companion to talk to. Nothing technical is ever shown on that screen. More in Recognize and Companion.
Is any of this sent somewhere to train an AI model?
No. Face and voice data are matched on-device or on a local server, never used for training, and scoped to one private account. Full breakdown in Privacy.
What if we stop using it?
Every enrollment, transcript and journal entry can be deleted the same way it was saved — there's no export lock-in because there's nothing proprietary holding your family's data hostage.
Free to start, yours to own
One full care circle, working end to end, before you connect a single paid account.
Meco uses on-device face descriptors to match enrolled visitors, then shares a gentle spoken introduction with the memory cues a caregiver has approved — before an awkward "do you remember me?" ever has to happen.
✓ Sarah · 92% match
Trusted people
SarahDaughter
JamesBrother
MeiFriend
Sarah is here
S
Hi, this is Sarah.
Your daughter. You both enjoy Sunday walks and looking through the blue photo album.
Face match92%
HOW IT GREETS
One glance, one gentle line
Patient mode watches quietly for an enrolled face. The moment it's confident, it speaks a short, caregiver-written line — a name, a relationship, one reassuring detail. Nothing more.
◎Trusted people
◌Memory cues
✦Voice greeting
⌁Patient mode
Two ways to be recognized
A visit rarely has just one voice in the room. Meco can tell people apart by face and by voice, so the transcript reads with real names instead of "Speaker 1."
◎
Enrollment takes three angles
Front, left and right poses are enough for face-api.js to build a numerical descriptor of someone's face — no photo library, no cloud upload. Matching strictness is a slider a caregiver can tighten or loosen at any time.
≋
Voices get names too
An optional voice sample lets Meco's local recognition server put a name on each speaker as the conversation happens, so a live transcript already reads "Sarah:" instead of an anonymous label.
✦
The greeting is caregiver-approved
Every spoken introduction comes from a memory cue a caregiver wrote in advance — never anything generated on the spot. What Meco says out loud is always something a family member chose to say.
⌁
Nothing is guessed
A greeting only plays when a real face descriptor clears the matching threshold. An empty room, a stranger, or a low-confidence match stays quiet rather than risk saying the wrong name.
What actually gets saved, per person
Four small pieces of data — nothing more — for each trusted person a caregiver enrolls.
Face descriptor
128 numbers
Not a photo
Built by face-api.js, right in the browser.
One thumbnail
Small, low-res
For the People list
So a caregiver can tell faces apart at a glance.
Voiceprint (optional)
One embedding
Stored locally
Only if a voice sample was recorded.
Memory cue
Caregiver-written
Plain text
The one line Meco is ever allowed to say out loud.
PATIENT MODE
Ready when you are
The camera is off until it's started on purpose. No timer, no pressure — just a quiet frame waiting for a familiar face.
One escape hatch: "Return to caregiver," always visible
Elder-friendly display mode, one toggle in Settings
Silence, not a wrong guess, when no match clears the threshold
The screen they actually see
Everything about Patient mode was written for the person in front of the camera, not the caregiver who configured it — short, warm, and never technical.
Plain language, no jargon
Nothing shown that isn't needed in the moment
THE VOICE
Sounds like family chose it — because they did
Rate, pitch and a male or female voice are all a caregiver's call, tuned once in Settings and used for every greeting after that. Nothing about it is generated per-visit.
“Hiii… this is Saaarah… your daughter.”
M
“The introduction is simple, but it changes the start of a visit. Everyone feels calmer and less rushed.”
Family member
See it recognize someone in minutes
Enroll one trusted person and try patient mode for yourself.
PRODUCT
Everything that matters, held together by Meco
One calm workspace for identity, conversations, summaries and caregiver follow-up — instead of a photo app, a notes app and a calendar that never quite agree with each other.
Listening — speakers separated live
Sarah: “Look who's here”
CONNECT
What's holding it together
Four pieces work quietly in the background so the people using Meco never have to think about any of them.
Three simple places to look, each one built around a question a caregiver actually asks.
People
Trusted faces and relationships
SSarahDaughterSunday garden walks
JJamesBrotherOld school stories
Memory Book
Stories, routines and reassuring cues
▸ Family▸ Places▸ Daily routines▸ Favourite music
Visit Reports
Structured transcripts and insights
31 JulSarahWarm
28 JulJamesCalm
22 JulMeiJoyful
Conversations, in more than one language
Not every visit happens in English. Meco can capture and translate a conversation in the language it's actually spoken in.
≋
Pick a speech language
Set the language a visit will be spoken in — English, Mandarin, Tamil or Hindi today — right from the conversation panel, before recording starts.
⇄
Live translation alongside
Each transcript line can show a translated line beneath it in a second language a caregiver chooses, so a family report stays readable for everyone.
⌁
Locked in once recording starts
Language choices lock the moment a visit begins recording, so nothing shifts mid-conversation — and unlock again the instant it stops.
Every visit, still there next month
Nothing in Meco expires or gets summarized away. A visit from three months ago reads exactly like it did the day it was saved.
▤
The full transcript stays
Speaker-labelled turns, not just the AI summary — so a caregiver can go back and check what was actually said, not just what Meco thought it meant.
◴
Searchable by person or date
Visit Reports lists every recorded visit, newest first, filterable by who was there — useful when "didn't we talk about this already?" comes up.
✓
Deletable, the same way it was saved
A visit transcript can be removed entirely, whenever a caregiver decides it should be — nothing lingers by default that wasn't meant to.
Live when it can be, never blocked when it can't
Two separate paths get a visit transcribed, so one missing piece of infrastructure doesn't mean losing the conversation.
≋
Live, while the visit happens
Audio streams to Deepgram through Meco's own server as the conversation happens. Interim text appears turn by turn, each one checked against enrolled voiceprints for a name instead of "Speaker 1."
⇄
Batch, as the fallback
If live transcription is switched off, not configured, or nothing was captured in the moment, the recording uploads to AssemblyAI afterward — Universal-3.5 Pro routing, speaker labels included.
✎
Either way, a caregiver corrects it
Automatic speaker labels are a starting point, not the final word — every speaker's name can be corrected before a report is generated or a visit is saved.
NA son, on Meco
“One tab for who's visiting, what we talked about, and what to bring up next time.”
See the whole workspace
People, Memory Book and Visit Reports — connected from the first visit.
COMPANION
Something to talk to, between visits
A gentle AI companion for quiet afternoons, and a journal your Meco member can write in themselves — both built around the fact that they might not remember opening either one yesterday.
Hello! I remember you mentioning Sarah — your daughter. Would you like to tell me more about her garden?
She planted roses this year.
Wellbeing check · every conversation
Companion
Reminiscence promptDrawn from Sarah's memory cue
Open-ended questionNever a quiz, never a test
Spoken repliesOptional, off by default
A quiet afternoon
♥
Not a substitute for a visit.
It's somewhere to talk when no one else is in the room — and every conversation is there for a caregiver to read afterward, not hidden away.
Every reply reviewableAlways
HOW IT TALKS
Reminiscence, not small talk
Meco's companion opens with something real — a memory cue a caregiver already wrote for a trusted person — rather than a generic "how are you today?" It's a known, gentle conversation technique, not an improvised chatbot persona.
♥Memory-led prompts
≋Optional voice
◈Wellbeing signal
⚠Caregiver review
Read by a caregiver, not just logged
Every conversation is there to look back on — with an honest label on what the AI reading of it actually is.
◈
A wellbeing trend, not a diagnosis
Each conversation gets a rough, observational engagement score, charted over time. It's built to be honest about its own limits — a page in the app says so directly, in plain words, every time it's shown.
⚠
A flag when something's worth a closer look
If a conversation shows a pattern worth attention, the caregiver dashboard surfaces it — not to alarm, but so a quiet afternoon that felt off doesn't stay invisible.
✓
Nothing is deleted from the transcript
What was actually said stays visible next to the AI's read of it, so a caregiver can always check the summary against the real conversation.
Wellbeing over time5 reviewed conversations
Not a clinical tool. The notes and wellbeing signal are an AI's informal read of casual conversation only — not a diagnosis, screening tool, or substitute for professional medical advice. If you're concerned about your care recipient's wellbeing, please talk to a healthcare professional.
A journal in their own words
Separate from the companion chat — a simple, rich-text space a Meco member can write in themselves, whenever they want to.
Mood check-in
😊 Happy
🙂 Calm
😐 Okay
Six moods, easy to lightest to hardest.
Today's entry
Had a lovely visit from Sarah today.
We looked at old photos together.
Their own words, not a summary.
Mood over time
A gentle pattern, not a score.
Always private
Only this care circle
Never used to train anything
Same account isolation as everything else in Meco.
MADE TO BE LEGIBLE
Bigger text, bigger buttons, one toggle away
Elder-friendly display mode scales up type and touch targets across Patient mode, the companion chat and the journal — a caregiver switches it on once in Settings, for the screens the Meco member actually uses themselves.
Elder mode — patient-facing screens only
LA granddaughter, on Meco
“Knowing there's a transcript, not just a summary, is the reason I trust it at all.”
Give them something to open
A quiet chat and a journal, ready before the first visit even happens.
CAREGIVER
Care planning that doesn't feel like admin
Keep people, visits, notes and reminders close to the moments that created them — so the next visit starts with context instead of a blank page.
12:30Sarah visits
Synced to Google Calendar
SUPPORT
A day, at a glance
Everything a caregiver needs before a visit starts, in one place instead of four different apps.
▦ Visits
31 JulTodayFriday
✓ Follow-ups
Review Sarah's visit
Print family photo
Add garden memory
▤ Memory note
Today
Sarah mentioned the old blue album and the patient smiled when the garden was discussed.
◴ Reminders
12:30 Sarah visits
17:10 Review Meco report
Visits and reminders, synced
A visit scheduled in Meco doesn't need to be typed a second time somewhere else.
◴
Two-way Google Calendar sync
Connect a Google account once, and every visit or reminder — including ones that repeat weekly — stays in sync automatically. Change it in Meco or directly in Google Calendar; either way, the other one catches up.
✓
Follow-ups that don't get lost
A note from a visit report can become a follow-up reminder with one click, so an insight from Tuesday's transcript doesn't quietly disappear.
CONNECTED TO YOUR CALENDAR
Stay on schedule, without a second calendar
Meco checks Google Calendar roughly every 90 seconds in both directions — move a visit on your phone's calendar app and Meco already knows by the time you open it.
12:30 · Sarah visits — synced from Google Calendar
Set it once for the visits that repeat
Sunday lunch, the Tuesday carer, Friday physio — most visits aren't one-offs, so Meco doesn't make you re-enter them like they are.
Pick the days
MonWedFri
Any combination, not just "every day."
Edit one, or all
Change a single visit
Or the whole series
A single reschedule doesn't break the pattern.
Reminders repeat too
Weekly medication check
The same weekly-repeat rule as visits.
VISIT REPORT
Sunday with Sarah
They spoke about the garden, family photographs and a favourite blue dress.
Recognized Sarah's name
Smiled during garden memories
Asked to see the photo album
Keep every visit close to the story
Speaker-labelled transcripts and reviewed summaries stay linked to the person, relationship and memories that matter.
Multi-speaker transcription
Structured AI summary
Questions caregivers actually ask
What if a visit happens and I forget to check the app?
It's still there. Nothing about a recorded visit expires — the transcript and report wait in Visit Reports for whenever there's time to look.
Can more than one family member get the reminders?
Today, one signed-in account holds one care circle's calendar and reminders. Sharing that same view across multiple caregivers is on the roadmap.
What happens if I disconnect Google Calendar?
Visits and reminders already in Meco stay exactly where they are — disconnecting just stops the two-way sync going forward.
Does a reminder ever get marked done automatically?
No. A caregiver checks it off, the same way they'd cross something off a paper list — Meco never assumes a task happened.
A
“Meco gives our family one place to remember what helped, what made Mum smile, and what we should bring up next time.”
A caregiver using Meco
Plan the next visit in minutes
Schedule it, get reminded, and walk in already knowing what matters.
PRIVACY
Help when you need it — privacy where it matters
Face matching runs in the browser. API keys stay on the server. Your account protects each sign-in and Appwrite stores its records separately. Here's exactly what that means.
Encrypted connection
What actually leaves the browser
Less than most apps like this. Here's the honest breakdown, piece by piece.
◎
Face matching stays on-device
Enrollment and recognition both run through face-api.js in the caregiver's own browser. A numerical descriptor and a small thumbnail are what get saved — not a photo library, and not a raw video stream sent anywhere.
≋
Voice recognition runs locally too
Speaker voiceprints are computed by a small local server on the caregiver's own machine. They never travel to a third party for identification.
⌁
Provider keys never reach the browser
Every call to AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Gemini or Google Calendar is proxied through Meco's own server. The credentials for those services are never present in anything the browser can see or inspect.
✓
Each account is its own space
Clerk verifies who's signed in on every request. Appwrite stores that account's people, visits and transcripts separately from every other account — nothing is shared by default.
At a glance
Stays on-device
Face matching
Voice matching
Computed locally, never uploaded to identify anyone.
Proxied, key hidden
AssemblyAI
Deepgram · Gemini
Every provider call routes through Meco's server.
Account-scoped
People · visits
Journal · chats
Isolated per Clerk-verified account, nothing shared.
Deletable, always
Enrollments
Transcripts
Removed the same way they were saved.
You're in control
Adjust how strict face and voice matching are, re-enroll a trusted person at any time, or remove someone's enrollment entirely. A visit transcript can be deleted the same way it was saved.
PRIVATE CARE SPACE
Sarah's visit
Encrypted connection
About consent
Face descriptors and voiceprints are biometric data belonging to the person being enrolled — not the caregiver doing the enrolling. Meco doesn't paper over that with a checkbox.
◌
Ask before enrolling someone
A trusted person's face and voice should only ever be captured with their knowledge, or on behalf of someone whose care you're legally responsible for. Meco doesn't verify this for you — it's a real conversation to have first, not a setting to toggle.
⌁
Decide retention before you record
How long a transcript, a descriptor or a voiceprint should be kept — and who gets to delete it — is a family decision Meco doesn't make on your behalf. Everything can be removed; nothing removes itself.
PA caregiver, on Meco
“I could actually explain to the family what leaves the house and what doesn't — that mattered more than I expected.”
Read the code, not just the promise
Meco is built with no hidden npm dependencies — every integration is a plain, auditable request.
PRICING
Begin with one care circle
Use the full local experience, then connect your own Clerk, Appwrite, AssemblyAI and Gemini accounts when you're ready for real, ongoing use.
$0to start
✓
No app fee, ever
MECO STARTER
Free to build
$0 app fee
Caregiver and patient modes
Trusted face enrollment
Speaker-labelled visits
AI caregiver reports
Visits, reminders and calendar sync
Third-party API usage is billed by your providers.
What needs your own account
Meco itself has no subscription. A handful of providers do the heavy lifting behind it, and each one has a free tier that comfortably covers a single care circle.
Identity & storage
Clerk (sign-in) and Appwrite (records) both offer a free tier that's built for exactly this scale — one account, one family.
Transcription
AssemblyAI and Deepgram bill by the minute of audio processed. Costs only start to matter once you're recording many hours of conversation.
AI summaries
Gemini and Groq both offer free-tier access generous enough for regular visit reports.
WHY FREE
Meco doesn't sell what it collects
There's no ad model here, and no plan to add one — the app itself has no subscription because the thing it's asking you to trust it with (a face, a voice, a visit) isn't something to monetize twice.
$0 app fee, no tier to upgrade to
What one care circle actually costs
A rough shape, not a quote — provider pricing changes, and it depends how many visits get recorded. This is what a typical month looks like for one family.
Meco itself
$0
No app fee, no tier, ever.
Clerk + Appwrite
$0
Comfortably inside both free tiers at this scale.
Transcription
A few dollars
Billed per minute of audio, by AssemblyAI or Deepgram.
AI reports
$0
Gemini's free tier covers regular visit reports.
Common questions
Do I need to be technical to set this up?
You'll need to create accounts with the providers above and paste a few keys into a settings file. There's no coding required, but it isn't yet a one-click signup.
Can more than one caregiver share an account?
Today, one signed-in account holds one care circle. Sharing that same view across multiple family members is on the roadmap.
FOR CLINICIANS
A structured record of psychosocial engagement
A technical and clinical overview of Meco's design rationale, its grounding in established non-pharmacological dementia-care practice, and the explicit boundaries of what its outputs may and may not be used for. Prepared for the clinician a family brings this to — not marketing copy.
Reminiscence-based stimulus
Longitudinal visit record
Non-diagnostic instrument
Observational, not diagnostic
Mechanism of action
Three discrete functions, each targeting a specific point of friction in caregiving: the moment of recognition, the documentation of a visit, and the interval between visits.
◎
Biometric identification with caregiver-authored disclosure
On-device facial-descriptor matching (128-point encoding, no cloud inference) triggers a brief, caregiver-authored verbal disclosure of identity and relationship prior to conversational initiation — intended to preempt the anxiety response associated with unprompted unfamiliarity recognition failure.
▤
Structured documentation of visit content
Multi-speaker diarized transcription with a caregiver-reviewed structured summary (affect descriptor, engagement indicator, thematic content, follow-up prompts) — producing a longitudinal, chronologically ordered record suitable for caregiver reference or clinical discussion.
♥
Interstitial psychosocial engagement
A reminiscence-prompt conversational agent and a self-directed journaling instrument provide unsupervised engagement opportunities between visits, with full transcript retention for retrospective caregiver review.
Theoretical basis
No component here constitutes a novel clinical intervention. Each applies an established, non-pharmacological, psychosocial approach to dementia care via software, and is labeled as such rather than presented under proprietary terminology.
Reminiscence therapy & person-centered care
Conversational prompts are derived from caregiver-authored autobiographical cues, consistent with reminiscence-therapy principles: eliciting recall of positive, personally salient material rather than open-ended or performance-oriented questioning, in keeping with a person-centered care model.
Reality orientation
The Patient-mode orientation display — current date, time-of-day-appropriate salutation, next scheduled visit — approximates reality-orientation-therapy (ROT) boards used in institutional care settings, integrated into a single-screen interface.
Music-based recall stimulus
The Familiar Sounds function allows a caregiver to associate a personally meaningful recording with an individual — consistent with the Music & Memory model, in which familiar music is used as a low-risk stimulus for affect regulation and autobiographical recall in persons with dementia.
Caregiver-mediated oversight
Every system-generated output — greeting text, visit summary, conversational reply — remains editable and deletable by a caregiver prior to or after generation. No output is acted upon autonomously; a human reviewer is a structural precondition of the design, not an optional safeguard.
SCOPE & LIMITATIONS
Not a diagnostic instrument. Not a substitute for clinical judgment.
The "wellbeing signal" reported to caregivers is an unvalidated, model-generated inference over unstructured, naturalistic conversational data — an engagement pattern for a caregiver to notice, not a scored or normed clinical measure. It has not been validated against any standardized instrument (e.g. GDS, NPI, MMSE), is not a screening or diagnostic tool, and does not constitute medical advice. This disclosure is presented verbatim on every generated report. Where a family raises concern about symptom change or cognitive decline, Meco's own guidance directs them to a qualified clinician rather than to further use of the product.
Presented unedited on every AI-generated report
Data governance & informed consent
Abbreviated for this overview — the complete technical disclosure is available in the Privacy chapter.
Informed consent, procedurally enforced
Not a footnote disclosure
Biometric enrollment is gated behind a mandatory consent interstitial that names the specific data captured, presented at the point of capture.
On-device biometric inference
Local computation only
Facial and voice descriptors are computed client-side; raw biometric data is not transmitted to a third party for identification.
Right of erasure
Deletion parity with capture
Any enrolled record — biometric descriptor, transcript, or journal entry — is deletable on request; no indefinite retention by default.
No secondary data use
No advertising, no model training
Revenue is not derived from data generated by a clinically vulnerable population.
Questions best directed to us
Data retention schedules, consent procedures for patients lacking capacity to consent, and the practical shape of a pilot deployment in your practice — we'd rather address these directly than leave them implicit.
Connecting Face models
MECO
Enter your private memory space.
Loading secure sign-in…
TRUSTED PERSON
Add someone familiar
Meco saves a numerical face descriptor and a small thumbnail. A real detected face is required. An optional voice sample adds a numerical voiceprint so Meco can name this person in the live conversation transcript.
Before you enroll someone
This captures biometric data — a numerical face descriptor, a small thumbnail, and optionally a voice embedding — for the specific person in front of the camera. Only enroll someone with their knowledge, or on behalf of someone in your legal care.
Start camera to enroll
FrontLeftRight
TRUSTED PERSON
Edit details
A song that matters to them — played in Browse Memories, the same idea behind familiar-music approaches used in dementia care.
The enrolled face angles and voiceprint stay as they are. Re-record them from the People list when they need updating.