Case Study — In Progress
Anchor — A care companion for the people holding everything together, in a system that was never designed for them.
TYPEProduct Design
Healthcare UX, Emotional Accessibility
FOCUSUSERSFamily Caregivers, Self Advocates
STATUSIn Development
OVERVIEWCaregiving is full-time work. The tools that exist were built for the system, not the person using them.
Family caregivers carry a cognitive load that never fully lifts. They track medications across years. They remember which drugs caused reactions, which were discontinued and why, which specialists said what and when. They prepare for fifteen-minute appointments that took months to schedule. They absorb medical information delivered in clinical language nobody explained to them. They do this while managing their own lives, their own health, their own grief — often alone, often without acknowledgment that what they're doing is extraordinary.
The tools that exist were built for hospitals, not for the people holding everything together.
WHERE IT STARTEDThis project began with a personal reality, not a market analysis.
I grew up in Queens in an immigrant family, translating complex systems before I understood that translation was a skill. My brother Felix, who was autistic, showed me that the world makes more sense when someone takes the time to break it down. Clarity is dignity. Anchor is named after him.
I have been my father's primary caregiver since his heart failure diagnosis in 2017. For nearly a decade, I have been the connective tissue between every part of his care — because doctors see a slice, and the caregiver holds the complete picture. In their head. In scribbles. In a folder of PDFs nobody else can read.
I have also felt what it is like to open a health app looking for something that actually helps, and find nothing built for me.
Anchor is my attempt to design what I needed and didn't have. I learned how to do this from my brother. I learned why it matters from my father. The product exists because of both.
THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMWhy nothing good exists yet.
The caregiver tool category is underdeveloped for a simple reason: hospitals did not choose patient portals because caregivers loved them. They chose them because they were already paid for.
What changed: a federal rule now lets patients pull their own health data without asking the hospital's permission. That opens a door that has been closed for decades. It makes a genuinely independent caregiver product viable in a way it wasn't five years ago.
THE CORE INSIGHTAnchor has two users who are sometimes the same person.
A caregiver in the morning can be the patient by afternoon. Someone managing a chronic illness alone is simultaneously giving care and receiving it. Someone who starts using the app without support may find a caregiver later and need to hand off context without losing history. The line between caregiver and patient isn't a fixed boundary — it's a situation people move in and out of, often without warning or support.
Onboarding presents three options: I'm caring for someone. I'm caring for myself. Both. The answer shapes the entire experience and can change at any time without losing what was built before. A user caring for a parent alone can add a sibling to the care circle. A solo patient can bring in a caregiver when needed.
THE DESIGN SYSTEMEvery visual decision was made in the same room.
The visual language of Anchor was built around a specific moment: a caregiver at midnight, phone in hand, trying to find one piece of information without waking anyone up.
If an element doesn't reduce cognitive load or surface something that matters to this person right now, it doesn't exist on screen.
Dark mode as the default.
A deep navy header, near-black body, dark card surfaces. A single quiet teal accent reserved for primary actions, active states, and confirmed interactions only. Typography is deliberately restrained: Playfair Display for greetings and screen titles, DM Sans for everything functional. The overall mood is a late-night hospital room — focused, calm, nothing extra.
Light mode as the equal.
Built from warm off-white and cool light gray, with the same navy header anchoring both modes. It is not an inverted dark mode. It has its own warmth — warm paper, not hospital wall.
WCAG AA compliance
I verified WCAG AA compliance at every text and background combination. Given the user population of caregivers under sustained stress, older adults, people with visual impairments navigating a difficult moment, accessibility isn’t a feature. It’s the foundation.
CORE FEATURES
Designed for the moments that matter most.
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The home screen knows who the user is. After onboarding it surfaces what matters to that specific person today, not a generic menu. A warm greeting. A plain-language summary. An expandable priority strip showing the two most pressing items with an option to reveal more. Urgent items — a medication with a narrow window, a pre-procedure fasting requirement — are flagged with a small amber dot. Not a badge. Not a banner. Just enough signal to act.
The caregiver check-in lives at the top of every session. Not a form, not a clinical assessment — a simple question. Four options in two visible rows:
Doing okay. Hard day. Need a break. Proud of myself.
Tapping one opens a conversation. Anchor's response is warm, precise, and brief. It does not perform empathy. It responds to what was actually said.
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Medications exist in three states, each with its own tab: Currently taking. Discontinued. Reactions and Allergies.
After years of caregiving, the medication history is as important as the current list. A doctor asking "has he ever taken Lisinopril?" deserves a real answer, not a reconstruction from memory. The discontinued tab shows when a medication was stopped and why, in plain language: "Switched to Losartan due to persistent cough." The reactions tab shows what happened — specific, dated, severity-coded. Three levels: Mild, Moderate, Severe. The color does the work without alarming.
Every medication card includes a plain-language description of what it does. "Helps reduce fluid buildup around the heart." Not a clinical indication. An explanation a person can hold onto and repeat to the next specialist.
Supply levels are monitored quietly. Low supply triggers warm amber text, just enough signal to act before it becomes a crisis.
The logged state matters too. After confirmation, the "Log Taken" button becomes a ghost "Logged ✓" in teal. It confirms without demanding. The interaction is complete. The screen reflects that.
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The calendar is not a scheduling tool. It is simultaneously a receipt and a map.
A 7-day strip shows the current week. Past days show what happened under the label "What happened.” Not "History," not "Log." Medications taken with timestamps, or "Missed" in amber if skipped. Future days show what's scheduled under "Coming up." Today shows both. "Done" above a thin divider and "Still to come" below.
The day of the week is always explicit. Not just "May 2" but "Thursday, May 2." Because a Tuesday at noon appointment is a different logistical problem than a Saturday morning one, and caregivers are managing their own lives alongside everything else.
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Anchor includes an AI companion built into the care ecosystem. It knows the patient's profile. It speaks in plain language. It does not diagnose. It does not prescribe.
What it does: explains what a medication actually does in terms a person can repeat. Translates test result language. Surfaces suggested questions before a specific appointment with a specific doctor, based on what's changed since the last visit. And when a caregiver opens it after a hard night, meets them where they are before offering anything informational.
The companion has two entry points reflecting two different needs. From the caregiver check-in, it opens in emotional mode — the conversation is the thing. From the Anchor nav tab, it opens in informational mode — suggested prompts based on the actual patient profile, a text input, and a persistent footer: "Anchor supports your care. It does not replace your doctor."
That line is not a legal disclaimer. It is a design philosophy.
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A persistent search bar lives at the top of the home screen and collapses to a header icon on every secondary screen. It crosses every data layer simultaneously: current medications, discontinued, reactions, appointments, calendar history, past companion conversations.
Typing a medication name surfaces its card from whichever tab it lives in, with its visual treatment intact. Typing a doctor's name surfaces every appointment chronologically. The caregiver sitting in an exam room can find anything in seconds without navigating section by section under pressure.
Redundancy is intentional. Different users navigate differently, and the same user navigates differently depending on what kind of day they're having. Options are not a failure of hierarchy — they are an accessibility principle.
THE COMMUNICATION BOARD — RECONSIDERED
A shared language layer for the full care relationship.
The communication board is not a tool for the care recipient to express needs outward. It is a shared language layer for the entire care relationship: bidirectional, contextually aware, integrated with the care record, and accessible to everyone in the care circle.
What's missing is a structured way to track how the person in your care is communicating their experience across medication moments, appointments, daily routines so you're not reconstructing it from memory when the cardiologist asks questions. That pattern of communication, logged and timestamped, becomes clinical information. When a care recipient communicates pain repeatedly on a Tuesday afternoon an hour after their afternoon dose, that is a data point that currently lives nowhere. Anchor captures it as a byproduct of normal use.
The larger vision extends further. A bidirectional board where caregivers can also communicate to care recipients does not exist in any current tool. Contextual boards that activate based on the day's scheduled events. Communication events logged to the care timeline. Boards shared across the entire care circle so a sibling taking over for a weekend opens the same configured system without a rushed handoff text. Customization that goes beyond generic icons to include photos, specific names, emotion states beyond physical needs.
This matters for caregivers supporting people with dementia, stroke survivors with aphasia, people with ALS — conditions where communication itself becomes part of the care work. A clear, low-stimulus, predictable communication interface is better for any human in a stressful medical moment.
Phase 1 includes the foundational communication logging. The full bidirectional contextual system is where the product grows as the user base expands.
WHAT THIS IS NOTHonest about scope. Clear about purpose.
Anchor doesn't replace clinical care. It makes the care that exists actually navigable.
The app surfaces a care team handoff prompt when a question exceeds its scope. It never performs certainty it doesn't have — through reminders using honest language.
THE ROAD AHEADBuilt in phases, grounded in reality.
The product on this page is Phase 1. What's in front of me is building something caregivers actually want to use. I’ll earn everything else from there.
Phase 1: Standalone Caregiver Tool
Users enter their own data. The value is in the design (the cognitive accessibility, the emotional intelligence, the longitudinal memory layer). No EHR integration required. No institutional partnership. No HIPAA compliance infrastructure beyond responsible data handling.
Phase 2: FHIR Integration
The 21st Century Cures Act mandated that EHRs expose patient data through standardized APIs. A patient can now authorize a third-party app to pull their health records from Epic, Cerner, or Meditech without the hospital's permission. Phase 2 uses this to reduce manual data entry like medications and appointments pulled automatically, with user authorization. This is where HIPAA compliance infrastructure becomes relevant and where the product's clinical utility expands significantly.
Phase 3: Institutional Conversation
Partnerships with health systems who want to offer caregivers something MyChart cannot. By this point there are users, retention data, and proof. Patient engagement is a metric health systems are measured on. A product their patients use and trust is leverage, not a sales pitch.
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