Hearth
- Evenings-and-weekends non-profit pairing 3D-printed companion pods with voice-first, memory-reinforcing AI conversation for isolated seniors.
- Piloting now inside a York Region, Ontario assisted living facility, in partnership with one of the province's larger assisted living providers.
- Built for a real epidemic: 57% of Canadian seniors report loneliness, and chronic isolation raises dementia risk in older adults by roughly 50%.
- A bet that AI can do real good today, not just optimize B2B workflows.
57% of Canadian seniors report feeling lonely in the past year. In the US, the Surgeon General has called loneliness an epidemic, one that raises an older adult's risk of dementia by roughly 50%. Almost nobody is building for it directly, and that's the gap this project sits in.
Hearth is what I've been spending evenings and weekends on: 3D-printed companion pods paired with a voice-first screen, running an LLM built for one job, conversation and memory-reinforcement for seniors who don't have a partner to talk to. We're running our first pilot now, inside a facility in York Region, in partnership with one of Ontario's larger assisted living providers.
The problem, in numbers
About one in four older adults experiences social isolation. By 65, 80% of seniors living alone are divorced or widowed, the highest-risk group for both loneliness and what it does to you. In the US alone, social isolation among older adults adds an estimated $6.7B a year in excess Medicare spending, and chronic loneliness is linked to a roughly 50% higher risk of dementia.
None of that is abstract to the person living it. It's a resident eating dinner alone because their spouse passed, or someone who used to call their sister every night and now has no one on the other end.
What we're building
The hardware is a small, warm, 3D-printed pod, deliberately not clinical-looking, paired with a screen and a voice interface. Residents talk to it the way they'd talk to a person: about their day, their family, things they remember. The software is an LLM tuned for exactly that, with memory built in - it remembers what someone told it last week and brings it back gently, the way a good friend would.
This is AI aimed at a problem that actually matters, not another layer of B2B optimization. If it works, the upside isn't a margin. It's someone who was alone this evening and now wasn't.
The pilot
We partnered with one of Ontario's larger assisted living providers to run our first pilot inside a facility in York Region. Early days - we're still learning what residents actually want from these conversations, and how staff want to use it alongside their own care. But it's real people, in a real facility, talking to something that remembers them.
Hearth is a non-profit by design. The goal isn't a return. It's proof that this kind of care can scale to every facility that needs it.
More soon.