MeHealthy: Supporting Aging in Place through Virtual Assistants
Research Paper | React Prototype
Senior Care
Health, UX/UI Design, Accessibility, Voice Interface
Year:
2025
MeHealthy (www.mehealthy.net) is a medication management platform prototype addressing the healthcare crisis facing America's rapidly aging population. This project began as an academic investigation into AI-powered virtual health assistants for senior independence, analyzing how voice-first technology could enable older adults to age safely at home while reducing the burden on caregivers and healthcare systems.
Project Type: Academic Research → Prototype
Timeline: Fall 2025 – Ongoing
Course: HINF5101: Introduction to Health Informatics, Northeastern University
Deliverables: 10-page peer-reviewed research paper + React prototype
Target Users: Older adults who want to age in place independently but need support with health management and daily living activities.
Seniors aging at home face challenges with medication adherence, health monitoring, safety, and mental well-being. Traditional solutions like in-home caregivers are expensive and intrusive, while existing health apps fail to accommodate older adults' needs. Research shows virtual assistants have proven effective for senior care, but haven't achieved mainstream adoption—current designs don't prioritize clinical safety, use patronizing language, or properly integrate conversational AI capabilities that could make these tools genuinely accessible.
Through analysis of peer-reviewed studies (Mahmood et al. 2025, Wong et al. 2024, Aldawsari & Chen 2024), I identified four high-potential use cases:
Health Monitoring & Routines: LLM-powered prototypes co-designed with seniors showed improved medication adherence through personalized reminders and after-visit summary debriefing
Mental Health Support: Seniors valued VAs as emotional outlets without burdening family, with ability to suggest activities while respecting autonomy
Cognitive Function: VAs successfully compensated for absent therapists during at-home cognitive training
Safety Intervention: Voice-activated environmental control and IoT integration enabled proactive monitoring and emergency response
After writing this research paper, I grew interested in prototyping a medication manager for the first use case.
MeHealthy is a two-sided platform prototype pairing a primary app (for older adults) with a support app (for family/caregivers). The design prioritizes clinical safety through medication-specific protocols rather than universal rules, empowering language that respects user autonomy, and interfaces built for accessibility.
The primary app features large, high-contrast UI (18-24pt fonts, WCAG AAA contrast), voice-activated medication reminders with clinical context, gentle escalation for missed doses, and symptom tracking integrated with medication logs.
The support app provides real-time adherence dashboards, configurable alerts, multi-caregiver coordination, and pattern insights for early intervention.
Key workflows handle daily routines (confirming each medication with specific instructions), missed doses (applying medication-specific rules and appropriate escalation), and PRN medications (checking timing limits and tracking patterns).
I'm continuing to develop the medication interface with more sophisticated dose-level tracking, complex scenario handling (drug interactions, tapered dosing). I've become more familiar with Cursor, GitHub, and AWS through this project––another technology I'd be interested in learning next would be integration with a real voice assistant.
The current prototype demonstrates medication management workflows, but represents only one of the four senior care scenarios I felt VAs could effectively address. In time, I would also like prototype the other high-potential use cases identified in my research: mental health support through conversational check-ins and activity suggestions, safety intervention via IoT integration for environmental control and fall detection, and cognitive function support through at-home training exercises.