Starting to use

mindminder was originally designed to work on the Amazon Alexa voice platform.
After over a year of development, trialling, testing, redeveloping, tweaking and frankly a lot of challenges (largely due to the need to handle a variety of question and answer variants that needs to be tolerant of a User's variable and possibly unpredictable response) mindminder was just about ready for attempting a number of limited trials with various Users/settings lined-up.

Sadly, changes to the direction of consumer Alexa, and most notably some new  Amazon Skill developer T&Cs rendered the use of Alexa as a portal for the mindminder conversation impossible. This was a sad day for mindminder as even talking directly about the benefits of mindminder with Amazon Alexa employees has given some really promising feedback on the viability of working with Amazon on the deployment and overall principles behind mindminder.

So... despite a week or two of recalibration, mindminder refused to be defeated and now lives-on as a web-enabled solution. In reality this opens up some further functionality options that Alexa could/would have never allowed practically (without a screen in the majority of cases) so it's been a case of "one step back ffor two steps forward".

The journey continues however there are a number of issues around the use of any tool or process with those suffering from any medical condition regarding consent and the storing of personal and medical details. These mountains are worth climbing but to do so mindminder needs to complete a couple of prerequisites to demonstrate robustness, usability, and security.

As such please, to keep abreast of developments please follow mindminder on LinkedIn or Facebook, send an EMail, or check back here soon for exciting news of mindminder's journey.

Thankyou for your interest so far.

Get Ready...

To use mindminder effectively you will need to understand a few key concepts; these aren't complicated but they may sound a bit unfamiliar and daunting until you have realised how simple it really is. 
There are three main "Roles" necessary to manage a mindminder User's experience. It's therefore starting to plan your particular roles and the people who may be associated with these roles before you start as it will make the setup process much more efficient. Similarly, you may have been invited to start using mindminder by someone else, so understanding your role and how it works with others will again help you manage the signup process most effectively. 
In simple terms the roles used by mindminder are as follows:

  • Carers 
    Carers are people who have an interest in the output of mindminder or who wish to manage and maintain the personalised content that mindminder delivers to a User. A Carer could be a care professional in a residential care home setting, a visiting domiciliary carer, a neighbour, or a family member (for example a Son or Daughter of the User).
  • Users
    Users are the people talking to mindminder via an Alexa-enabled device. They could be related to a Carer by being a Carer's patient, client, neighbour or familymember but their role is essentially unchanged - talk to mindminder and respond to the questions in the conversation.
  • Organisations
    An organisaton is just a simle way of linking Users and Carers. The imporatnt point is that neither Users or Carers need to be members of just one Organisation.
    An Organisation could be a Residential Care Home where there are multiple carers and multiple Users within the Organisation itself. However an Organisation could be a family unit with two sibling children Carers have oversight of a perent User and in this case the Organisation is the "family" itself.

What's important to understand is the following key points. Don't worry if it sounds daunting, all of this is explained again when you're doing the setup for real and it really only takes 10minutes to get going with mindminder if you've thought these things through in advance.

  • As a Carer you cannot access or manage any User not in an Organisation you're already a member of. You need to be invited to an Organisation by those already in it.  
  • A Carer can be a member of one or more Organisations. For example a Carer in a care home could also have a parent they also wish to have access to mindminder so this Carer would be a member of the care home's Organisation and a familial Organisation within which their parent User also exists. Importantly in this example the members of the User's family do not have access to the care home residents simply because of the the family-member Carer who also works in the care home.
  • Carers can care for many Users. This seems obvious but note that although a Carer may come into contact with many Users in or outside of their Organisation, a Carer can only manage a User in his/her Organisation(s) and only once certain key User details are known. This means that, using an example of the Residential Care Home, not all Carers have access to all Users (unless explicitly requested/granted).
    This approach allows Organisations to be managed at a level suited to the care arrangements. Each Ward or site could be a unique Organisation to permit local restrictions to be applied for example.
  • Carers can care for many Users across many Organisations. For example a GP could be using mindminder to review patient progress where patients are spread across many Organisations. However, again, having been assigned access to Users in a particular care home, each User would also have to be assigned to a common Organisation with the GP in it too (in this case the GP's surgery could be an Organisation). This prevents cross-viewing of Users not under the care of that GP Surgery which may be a common occurrence in a care home where Users came from different regions. Even so, only GPs within the surgery who have been explicitly associated with a User can view those Users.
  • A User can be a member of one or more Organisations. For example a User in a care home could also be overseen by their children/family so this User would be a member of the care home's Organisation and a familial Organisation.  Extending the examples above an example User in a Care Home setting could be a member of:
    1. an overall Care Home Organisation allowing centralised monitoring of progress,
    2. a ward/floor-specific Organisation limiting access to specific care home staff assigned to that ward,
    3. a family Organisation allowing a son and daughter to support the User
    4: a GP's surgery where the assigned doctor for the User can also review data where necessary.

Some worked examples of some typical User/Carer/Organisation relationships are given below. Select the one that most aligns with your situation

In this example, Jenny wants to use mindminder as she's become increasingly worried about her dad, Jack Longmind, as he's seeming to get more and more forgetful and confused in conversations on the phone.
Jenny first creates a "Longmind Family" Organisation to set some common contact details and then allow the other interactions necessary to support Jack. Next she creates her own "Jenny" Carer Profile and then links up with the Longmind Family organisation. Similarly her husband John and brother Jimmy also create their own User profiles and link with the Longmind Family. 
At this stage, either of Jenny, Jack or Jimmy can create a User profile for Jack but Jenny does this. In doing so she also links Jack with the Longmind Family organisation. Even though everyone is still in the same Organisation, Jenny, John and Jimmy must now also explictly link with Jack so they can manage his personalised data. This is an important feature as, for example, if Jack's wife Julia was also part of the Longmind Family Organisation as a further User, Jenny may not wish her husband John to have any interactions with Julia. In this case, Jenny (and Jimmy) as siblings could support their mum Julia but John would have no access to Julia.
Should, sadly, Jack also happen to be in a care setting then he may also be a member of a further Organisation (see the next example below - the "Elmbridge House" Organisation) which would allow further Carers to support Jack but Julia's details would be inaccessible to Carers in the care home Organisation as she is still only a member of the Longmind Family and not Elmbridge House..

Here, we have a residential care home; Elmbridge House for which we'll work through. Elmbridge House has two shifts of six carers and a manager.
Beth the Manager firstly creates an "Elmbridge House" Organisation and adds the necessary contact details for the Organisation. At this stage, Beth can simply manage the Elmbridge House Organisation (in this case she would see the Users and Carers within Elmbridge House but she would have no access to the User details) but she also chooses to create her own Carer account.
Next she creates a couple of further Carer accounts (Charlie, Dawn, Eddy) and lets the remaining Carers create their own. Charlie, as care team lead, then creates User accounts for each of the residents and in doing so links each resident User with Elmbridge House's Organisation.  At this stage only Charlie will have any access to the residents' User accounts. Charlie then provides each User's details, to the shift leads and they link themselves to the Users. It's important to note that at this stage, even though all of the care team are members of Elmbridge House they do not by default have access to al Users until they have been invited by another User. In fact even Beth the manager won't be able to do much with the Users in Elmbridge House as she's not aware of the security details needed to link to their accounts. Thankfully Charlie catches up and adds Beth and the other care team leads pass on the User details for the Users they want to have managed by their particular Carers.
Now what Beth could have done is created more than one Organisation; one for day visit Users and one for live-in residential Users. This would have allowed Carers to be assigned to only one set of Users, and that day-only Carers would never be able to access residential Users.
If you followed the family example above then care resident Jack, as a User linked with Elmbridge House, would now be a member of the Longmind Family and Elmbridge House and both the Elmbridge House staff (where linked to Jack explicitly) and the Longmind Family would each be able to view and personalise Jack's mindminder experience.  However, Elmbridge House staff Carers would still have no access to Jack's wife Julia's User details as she's only a member of the Longmind Family.
As can be seen, the partitioning of Carers and Users between Organisations, and is an important feature that provides a powerful security control over access to Users outside a Carer's scope.

Here, Sam works as a visiting Carer for Cocoon Care Ltd. looking after a set of twenty clients in their own homes; visiting each every day or couple of days for the more independent clients.
The manager of Cocoon Care, Dawn, sets up an Organisation ("Cocoon Care") and Carer accounts for Sam and the other five carers working for Cocoon Care, and links them with the new "Cocoon Care" Organisation.  The Carers receive their account details via Dawn and then create User accounts for each of their respective Clients, linking them with Cocoon Care as they go.  However Sam's aware one of her new clients, Julia Longmind who's now living alone, is already a mindminder User via her family.  In this case, Julia can be linked with Cocoon Care in one of two ways:

  • Julia's family must obtain the details, from Sam, of the Cocoon Care organisation and link Julia with Cocoon Care as a second Organisation alongside the "Longmind Family"
  • Sam can receive Julia's User details from Julia's family and Sam herself can add Julia to Cocoon Care.

Once Julia is in the same Cocoon Care organisation, Julia can then link herself with Julia as a Carer and then both Sam and the Longmind Family Carers can support Julia's mindminder experience.  In this case, Dawn as the account holder for Cocoon Care would be able to see the Carers and Users who are linked with Cocoon Care Organisation, as she is neither a Carer nor linked to any Users through a Carer account, she would not have any access to any of the agency's client User details or personalisation.
As Sam sometimes shares care for a couple of her clients with other carers in the agency, as a Carer for these Users she can provide 
the respective User details to other Carers in Cocoon Care and they can then jointly support these Users too.

As a Health Professional, in each of the examples above, you could be added to oversight of any Users by the same mechanisms as described above.
For example, create an Organisation to align with your scope... here we'll use "Canada Drive Surgery". Next create User accounts for the GPs, Nurses or other relevant mindminder participants.  In this context it would typically make sense to be invited/opted-in to oversight of a patient User by the Carers of a patient User being given the surgery details and then adding their User to the "Canada Drive Surgery" Organisation. This would then permit the Carer to provide User details back to the surgery and the respective GPs to then add the patients as members of the surgery Organisation.  Again, simply because a patient User is a member of the surgery Organisation does not by default open up access to their mindminder User experience to all surgery staff without explicit invitation/details provision by existing Carers of the User (family, care home or domiciliary carers in the examples above).