My Mom Has Dementia. So I Built a Screener For It With AI
This is my mom. She has dementia. And we want none of your pity.
No Pity. I Mean It.
She has lived – will live – a wonderful life, with fierce pride. I am honored to be the strength for her now. The strength she is for me. Pity does not help her and it does not help me.
What I will take, gladly, is purpose. Purpose is what she and I value in this life.
The Diagnosis Came Too Late
Here is the part that keeps me up at night. My mom’s dementia was not caught early. I wish it had been. It wasn’t.
For most of human history, an early diagnosis mostly bought you time to plan. Painful, but not medical. That changed in 2023, when the FDA approved the first treatment that actually slows early Alzheimer’s. A second one followed in 2024. Both only work in the earliest stages of the disease. Miss that window and you are no longer eligible, for good. Early detection stopped being a nice idea and became a medical necessity.
So why isn’t everyone screened?
The reason is structural, and it has nothing to do with how much your doctor cares. Your primary care physician gets about 15 minutes with you. Cognitive screening is barely reimbursed. And there is no agreed plan for what happens after a worrying result.
So screening quietly never happens, and families like mine find out years too late.
I Built a Dementia Screener
I work in digital health. Over 25 years building digital tools in hard places, the kind of work where you have to get a clinical idea into patients’ hands with no budget and no patience for excuses. So rather than wait for a perfectly funded plan, I built a proof of concept, and I used AI to build it fast.
First Signs Health is free. It runs in a browser, takes about 20 minutes, and a caregiver can give it to a person they are worried about in a few minutes. It walks you through four validated screening tools (SLUMS, IQCODE, ACE-III, and SAGE) and produces a packet your doctor can really use, instead of you walking in and saying “I think something is wrong.”
Please screen your loved ones now.
Let me be clear about what it is not. It does not diagnose anyone. It is not FDA cleared. It is not a commercial product. It is the front door to care that millions of Americans currently do not have. I built a screener. I still need help building the rest.
This is how I refuse the pity. I put the hurt to work, the way my mom does. I show up and make myself useful. (I still cry, like I am right now typing this through the tears.)
So, whatcha think?
If you have cared for a parent with dementia (of which Alzheimer’s is the most famous, but not the only one), if you build clinical tools for a living, or if you just want to try the screener with someone you love, I want to hear from you.