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| A New Vision for Supporting Caregivers

| Liban Kano

Families are invisible home care agencies.

Allow me to be clear: families truly act and perform in the capacity of traditional home care agencies.

They do the work of trained professionals, often without pay, without training and with borrowed tools, yet most home care software is built for agencies and facilities, not for the family doing the work. No one knows the full weight of it all, except maybe the one person holding it together.

Tomorrow ⬇

Join the Positive Aging Community on Thursday Oct. 29 for an interactive discussion on AI and Care.

When my father broke his hip, our family became one of those invisible agencies overnight. He is healthy today, thanks be to God. Plenty of us wanted to help, and none of us could keep track of who was doing what. Still, I first built CareSupport for agencies. Many were happy with what they had, and what I built wasn’t different enough. Then someone told me about an app new parents use to keep each other posted on when the baby ate and slept, and it struck me that the same approach could work for the other side of life, for sons and daughters caring for their parents.

Every solution must pass one test: does it let caregivers touch their phone less?

The panel I’m joining describes a $944 billion senior care economy. AARP’s Public Policy Institute values the unpaid care families gave adults in 2024 at $1.01 trillion, and much of that work never looks like care. It looks like a group text asking who is covering Tuesday, who talked to the doctor and who knows what changed.

So what is working in AI and care? It is whatever fits into what families already do. For families, that is a text thread: a phone number, not another app. AI should take the remembering, and in time the chasing, off the shoulders of the one person who has to text everyone. When families keep texting what happened and what they need, the coordination leaves the record behind. Nobody fills in a form.

What is real today is narrower. CareSupport is an iMessage agent with nothing to install, and anyone can text it now. In testing this year, it has kept appointments, medications and schedules in one place, asked for the one detail it was missing instead of guessing, and said plainly what it couldn’t do yet. It coordinates the people around care, and it doesn’t treat anyone. It works one to one and does not yet do the asking for anyone. Dozens of people have tried it, most of them only once.

A text message isn’t the breakthrough. It is a natural form, and on its own that is not enough. Every new product in care, mine included, can add to the fragmentation families already live in, so the test for any of us is whether a family ends up with fewer places to look.

What comes next follows from that, and it is what we are designing now. One agent cannot fairly speak for everyone around one person, so each of them should have an agent that works only for them. A caregiver should be able to say, You need to get on my schedule. I can’t always say yes. And the agent of the person in care should ask before it acts: Is it okay for me to go and negotiate with everyone else? Then the person in care could say what they need once, let the agents do the asking, and no one would have to repeat themselves.

The best way I know to improve life for many people in care, outside of medicine and therapy, is to support the people who care for them. AI can be the coordinator that never gets tired and never gives up, so the people who are tired can rest, without taking away anyone’s say over their own care.

Here is what I want. I want the next canceled shift to cost one sentence, not a chain of texts and waiting. I want the families quietly running home care agencies to finally have something built for them. And I want no one person to be the operating system anymore.

Liban (lee~ben) Kano is the founder of CareSupport.com.