When I started volunteering in a memory care facility over 10 years ago, I had a deceivingly simple responsibility: “Don’t let the residents fall asleep.” So I did everything from learning to play piano (don’t ask me to play anything unless you like music from the 50s), leading exercise classes, performing poetry, listening to life stories (often many times on repeat), and even holding walker-friendly dance parties.

 

But one day, my favorite resident Ruth was on her way to the bathroom when she forgot why she needed a walker. She moved it to the side, kept walking, tripped, fell, and unfortunately passed away from injuries.

 

I came back to volunteer the next day and retrofitted walkers with vocal feedback & GPS navigation (by reverse engineering the Roomba’s cleaning map) to prevent an accident like this from happening again. I got deeper into problems faced in memory care facilities and started redesigning the bathing experience before building dalz.ai to leverage AI to slow dementia.

 

My first taste of the startup world was growing a student organization from 10 to 300 members (they’re 1,000+ now) and creating a team to design a prosthetic for a chef in Italy. I fell in love with building to help individuals in marginalized groups and haven't looked back.