CARELINK
Ruiyan Sun
Advisor: Kari Love
CareLink is a tablet-first UI/UX app that supports Alzheimer’s family caregivers through collaborative planning, symptom tracking, and emotionally sensitive design—helping reduce stress and improve care through an interface that understands their reality.
Project Description
Caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s is a deeply emotional, often overwhelming experience—especially for family members without clinical training. Between medication management, communication gaps, and daily unpredictability, family caregivers are left juggling tasks without tools truly designed for them.
CareLink is a tablet-native UI/UX project built specifically for non-professional caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s. Unlike apps tailored to nurses or health professionals, CareLink centers on emotional clarity, shared responsibility, and the lived experience of care at home. It provides features like collaborative task management, symptom tracking, simplified scheduling, and access to local support resources—all presented in a calm, focused visual environment.
The design is grounded in interviews with caregivers and research from organizations like the NYC Department for Aging and ComForCare. Rather than overwhelm users with clinical jargon, CareLink translates real caregiving needs into intuitive flows and emotionally aware interactions. It offers not just digital utility but care through design—an interface that speaks to exhaustion, not against it.
Technical Details
Software: Figma
Platform: Tablet-native application (concept)
Design Methods: User interviews, journey mapping, low-to-high fidelity prototyping
Research/Context
Family caregivers often navigate Alzheimer’s care without formal training, feeling overwhelmed and unseen. CareLink emerged from a desire to reimagine support—not as clinical instruction, but as design-led empathy. This project involved interviewing caregivers about their pain points and mapping daily caregiving routines that are too often ignored in traditional healthcare tools.
Research extended to public and private care support systems, including NYC’s Department for the Aging and ComForCare, to understand how available resources are accessed—or not—by families. In many cases, information exists but remains buried behind interfaces that intimidate or alienate.
CareLink’s visual tone was inspired by emotionally intelligent design systems and the storytelling frameworks in Graphic Medicine Manifesto, which emphasize care through communication and clarity. The result is not just a planning app, but a supportive space—one that acknowledges the invisible labor of caregiving and transforms it into something shared, visible, and a little more manageable.