ConnectOne: a simple one-button video calling device
Updated: 5 days ago
In January I was one of 45 students selected worldwide for Pioneer Academics, a university-level research program. My mentor was Dr. David O'Neil, a biomedical engineering professor at Northwestern, and I worked in a cross-cultural team, learning alongside student teams from China.
Our team started with a broad question: how might we help older adults with early-stage dementia stay independent and safe? We ended up somewhere else entirely, and getting there was the interesting part.
First we mapped Alzheimer's as a system, with causal loop diagrams showing how biology, healthcare access, caregiver stress and social life feed into each other. One loop kept showing up. As symptoms grow, people pull away from others, loneliness and depression set in, and cognitive decline speeds up. The research backed it. One study found chronic loneliness raises dementia risk about as much as carrying a gene variant linked to Alzheimer's. Another found loneliness roughly doubled the odds of a diagnosis.
Then we talked to people. A neurologist told us the social side matters as much as medication, and that doctors have no good tools for it. We held listening sessions with families living with the disease, including mine. My grandmother is 85 and has Alzheimer's, and she was one of the people we listened to.
What we heard changed our map. People with early Alzheimer's often withdraw on purpose, because they're embarrassed and don't want their lapses seen. More chances to socialize won't help if socializing feels humiliating.
So our final question became: how might we design a simple, emotionally unobtrusive solution that reduces loneliness without undermining cognitive autonomy or overburdening caregivers?
Systems thinking keeps you asking why. It's addictive: every new variable opens three more. The hard part came next, when we had to stop mapping and commit to a solution.After weeks of mapping why people with early Alzheimer's withdraw, our team had to switch modes and start designing.
We brainstormed for quantity first: simple communication devices, music and voice recordings of family, buddy programs, memory cafés. Then we dot-voted and plotted every idea by impact and feasibility. The ideas that rose to the top all had one thing in common: they asked very little of the person using them.
We picked three. The wildest was an AI companion that notices confusion and responds gently. The most impactful was MemoryBridge, a buddy program that pairs people in early-stage Alzheimer's with trained volunteers for regular, low-pressure conversation. The most feasible was ConnectOne: a single button that calls a loved one, for people who find smartphones frustrating but still want to stay in touch on their own.
Here I am presenting ConnectOne.
Our final paper ran 19 pages; read it below. The next step we proposed for MemoryBridge was a 12-week pilot with a memory care organization, measuring loneliness before and after.
This project taught me that systems thinking and design thinking need each other. One keeps you from solving the wrong problem. The other keeps you from never solving anything.
