Caregiver apps add AI features, but the work of caregiving stays with families

Apps built for family caregivers are adding AI. They now answer questions, summarise medical histories, draft questions for doctors and read calendars and patient portals. A report by Wired looks at several of these tools. Their developers and outside experts agree on one point: the software can take over some coordination work, but it does not solve the larger problem of caregiver strain.

The number of people involved is large. According to AARP figures cited by Wired, an estimated 63 million Americans cared for adults or children with a medical condition or disability in 2025, and these caregivers spend up to 27 hours per week on average providing care. Wired describes the result as poor health, financial strain and isolation for many of them.

What the apps do

Most of these tools are organisers. Medisafe, created in 2013, tracks medications, sends dose reminders and can alert a caregiver when a dose is missed. It also logs appointments, symptoms and health contacts, and includes a drug interaction checker. Caring Village, founded in 2015, offers a shared calendar, a to-do list, a wellness journal and task assignment. It also includes an AI assistant called Julia that answers caregiving questions.

Some of the tools were built by parents. Bret Koncak cocreated Mejo in 2022 after caring for his two sons, who have complex needs. Mejo turns a person's medical history into a one-page summary for doctors, therapists and other caregivers. A premium tier at $6 a month or $60 a year adds a shared daily journal. "A lot of people think that caregiving begins and ends with interactions with the health care system, but a lot of it is about what happens between care visits," Koncak told Wired. Data in Mejo is still entered by hand. Koncak says the team is exploring AI that would suggest questions to ask at medical appointments.

Brett Rowell is building an app called Briggzy so that he and his wife, who work different hours, can hand off care of their son, who has cerebral palsy. The app is in testing, and Rowell hopes to release it more widely in 2027. He describes its purpose as bringing his wife's knowledge of their son's care "into a shared space" so he can answer questionnaires and help.

The most automated example: Ari

Citizen Health, launched in 2024 by Nasha Fitter and Farid Vij, collects patients' medical records into a secure portal. With consent, Fitter says, the company extracts, deidentifies and harmonises that data to build an understanding of diseases, then feeds it back to families. The company works with patient advocacy groups on drug development research.

About six months before Wired's report, Citizen Health launched Ari, which it calls an AI "health teammate". Caregivers text with it to track care and symptoms. Ari can access medical records, patient portals and Google Calendar events. It looks for patterns, such as how the time of day a medication is taken relates to symptoms. It summarises past records before appointments, suggests questions for clinicians and helps with insurance and government benefits. Ari is in beta and currently limited to people with rare diseases. The company says it wants to make it available to all caregivers and patients.

The limits experts point to

I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethics and health law professor at Harvard Law School, expects AI to help many patients prepare questions before seeing a doctor. He also lists the risks. Most of these tools are not medical devices, so the FDA has not reviewed them, and their safety and efficacy rest on "the company's word." Health data that families enter at home usually does not come from a covered entity, so federal HIPAA rules do not protect it. In those cases, Cohen says, users rely on contractual promises that "typically have language that absolves [the companies] from responsibility in many instances." He adds that the data collected can include information about parents and other caregivers, not only the person receiving care.

The second limit is upkeep. Denise M. Brown, founder of the Caregiving Years Training Academy, says she has seen many apps come and go because keeping them current is tedious. "We have to upload data to the app (care plans, schedules, tasks), and that's a lot of work," she says. Physicians, visiting nurses, therapists and discharge planners do not log in to post updates, so the task returns to the caregiver. The Wired author, who cares for her son, makes the same point: the benefits depend on keeping the app updated.

Nicole Howell, director of direct care workforce development at the National Council on Aging, says the apps can support more connected care and possibly less stress. But she says the overall caregiver crisis is something "not one family, not one caregiver can solve," and that it needs government, the private sector and families.

What it means for work

These tools take on the administrative side of caregiving: tracking doses, sharing schedules, compiling histories and preparing for appointments. Ari goes furthest, reading records and calendars directly instead of waiting for someone to type them in. That removes some data entry, which Brown identifies as the reason many apps get abandoned. The physical care, the emotional labour and the hours remain with family members, and so does most of the coordination with clinicians who do not use these apps. Families also take on a new task: judging unreviewed tools and privacy terms that may offer little protection. Whether AI can lower caregivers' total load, and not just reorganise it, has not yet been shown.