MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Emotional response & medical context

  • Many readers found the project deeply moving, highlighting how simple tech can preserve dignity, reduce anxiety, and communicate love.
  • Several compare the mother’s condition to classic anterograde amnesia cases, noting the paradox of being unable to form new explicit memories yet still learning routines or emotional associations.
  • Some share personal stories of relatives with amnesia or dementia, emphasizing the daily distress of “not remembering that you don’t remember.”

Similar DIY projects & ideas

  • Multiple people describe their own e‑ink or tablet setups: Raspberry Pi dashboards, Telegram/image‑gen boards, photo frames, and family calendars.
  • One recurring idea: a simple, wall‑mounted e‑ink device that periodically renders a markdown or HTML page from a URL.
  • Others repurpose old Kindles, Kobos, or Nooks as passive web dashboards, sometimes jailbroken and scripted via Python.

Commercial and hackable e‑ink products

  • Numerous products are mentioned: TRMNL, Inkplate boards, Invisible Computers’ e‑paper calendar, framed news displays, KOMP, Luna, Boox tablets.
  • TRMNL draws both enthusiasm (hackable, OSS firmware, private plugins) and concern (cloud dependency, paid “Developer Edition,” documentation gaps), with clarifications that self‑hosting is possible by reflashing firmware.
  • Some note subscription costs (e.g., KOMP) as steep.

Design & UX for cognitive issues

  • Suggestions include: per‑message start/end times or expiry, visible message timestamps, default “fallback” messages, and explicitly reminding the user of their condition.
  • Others warn that persistent written notes can cause obsessive rumination; the ability for caregivers to remotely remove or update items is seen as crucial.
  • Several doubt effectiveness for some dementia cases where the person would not remember to check the display at all.

Technical implementation themes

  • Discussions cover kiosk browsing on Android, auto‑refresh web dashboards, basic local web servers, and reliability tricks (auto‑reload, watchdogs, periodic reboots).
  • E‑ink specifics: slow refresh and flashing on color panels; better performance on grayscale; debate over burn‑in vs. ghosting, with some vendors recommending periodic full refreshes.
  • Frontend details: lack of native CSS “fit text to container,” JavaScript workarounds, and mentions of container queries and layout frustrations.

Security & “tiny backend”

  • For the web UI, simple HTTP basic auth over HTTPS is suggested for small, fixed user sets.
  • Some recommend using Google Sheets or similar as an easy “tiny database” backend.