The person on the other end of that call is someone's whole world. We treat them that way.

Every call KindredMind handles follows the same principles that trained dementia care professionals are taught on day one: warmth before information, patience before resolution, comfort before accuracy.

The Alzheimer Society of Canada's published guidance for dementia-friendly phone calls, the accepted standard in professional memory care, doesn't ask caregivers to be literally accurate. It asks them to be warm, patient, and reassuring. To meet the person where they are.

That is the foundation every KindredMind call is built on.

Protecting your loved one, and your family's privacy, means building on that foundation with the same rigor. Here is exactly what we do.

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Data Minimization

The strongest privacy protection is the data we never collect. KindredMind is built so families never need to share medical records, diagnoses, or sensitive personal details. We do not collect your loved one's full legal name or date of birth, and we ask families not to share medical, financial, or other sensitive information. What we do hold, the voice model and the everyday details that make a call feel familiar, is kept to a minimum, encrypted, and can be deleted at any time.

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Consent and Legal Authorization

The service is set up and authorized by the family caregiver responsible for their loved one's care, ideally the person who holds legal decision-making authority. This is not a technicality. It is the framework that governs every care decision made on behalf of a person who lives with dementia: which facility, which medications, which care approaches, and which communication tools serve their wellbeing.

The person with dementia is not informed that calls are being answered by AI. This is a deliberate design decision grounded in the established ethics of dementia care, which prioritizes the emotional wellbeing of the person with dementia over factual transparency. The same clinical framework that guides professional dementia care communication supports this approach. We have written about this in detail.

The companion's voice presence is built only from your own short interview sessions with Sarah, our AI-guided voice setup, completed during onboarding, or, if you choose the assistant voice, from no voice recordings at all. Real conversations between the companion and your loved one are never used for training. Anything you want the companion to learn from a real call, you add yourself by opening the Voice tab and starting another short interview session.

Before we build your voice model, we ask for your explicit consent to use your recordings for that single purpose. Your voice is yours: it is only ever used to build your own companion. Never to build anyone else's. We never sell it. You can delete it at any time. The recordings themselves are automatically deleted within 24 hours of your voice model being ready. Read the full voice model guide →

You never have to record your own voice.

If recording your voice does not feel right for you, choose the assistant voice instead. It is a warm, natural companion voice that works exactly the same way, answering calls and making gentle check-in calls and reminders, and it draws only from the knowledge base you build about your loved one.

For a full treatment of our ethics and consent framework, read our ethics position. Read our ethics position →

Consent and authority when KindredMind reaches out

KindredMind can now make calls as well as answer them: scheduled check-in calls and gentle reminders in your own voice or the assistant voice. Because a call we place is more active than a call we answer, we hold it to the same protections, plus a clear standard of authority.

You confirm your authority to authorize it. Before you can turn on reaching out, you confirm that you hold the legal authority to authorize calls to your loved one, for example as their power of attorney or substitute decision-maker. We record that confirmation, with the date, as the basis for these calls. We do not independently verify power of attorney. We rely on your confirmation, and you remain responsible for having the authority you attest to.

Your loved one's wishes come first. If your loved one asks the calls to ease off, we honor it right away, even though you authorized them. Their own wishes take priority over the setup, always.

Reaching out is off until you turn it on. You choose whether to enable it, which days and times, and how often. Calls happen only inside safe daytime hours in your loved one's timezone, never late at night. If a call is not answered, we try once more and then leave it, with no repeated ringing.

The same safety applies. Mood monitoring, distress alerts, and post-call summaries work exactly as they do on answered calls, and KindredMind never tells your loved one you are on your way when you are not.

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Data Privacy: What We Collect and Why

KindredMind collects information in two categories: the information you give us directly (account details, intake data, knowledge base entries, voice recordings), and the information generated by calls (transcripts, timestamps, call metadata).

What we collect:

• Your first name, email address, and billing information
• Your loved one's preferred name (what you call them), personality, daily routine, family details, and life history, as entered in the intake form. We never ask for their full legal name or date of birth.
• Your voice recordings from short interview sessions with Sarah, our AI-guided voice setup, used to build your voice presence
• Transcripts and metadata from calls handled by KindredMind, encrypted at rest and deleted after 90 days
• Your interview-session recordings are used only to build your voice model and are automatically deleted within 24 hours of the model being ready
• On the Care Circle plan: each care circle member's own voice recordings and account details, linked to the shared care circle but stored separately and owned by that individual caregiver

What we do not collect:

• We do not ask for your loved one's full legal name or date of birth; only their preferred name (Mom, George, Nana) and the personal details that help KindredMind companion know them
• We never store call audio from your loved one's calls. Only a written transcript of each call is kept.
• We do not collect data from your loved one's existing phone or contacts
• We do not track your browser activity outside of kindredmind.care
• We do not sell data to third parties. We do not share data with advertisers. We do not use your data to build models for other companies.

Encryption: What Is Protected and How

KindredMind is built privacy-first from the ground up; we never collect your loved one's full name or date of birth. The personal details you do share, their life story, every word of every call, your phone number, are encrypted before they are ever written to our database. If our database were stolen, an attacker would find nothing but unreadable ciphertext.

Everything sensitive is encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption, the same standard used by financial institutions and healthcare providers. This includes:

• Your loved one's life history, personality notes, and all intake form fields
• Family member information and relationship notes
• All call transcripts, every word of every conversation
• Caller phone numbers and your caregiver phone number
• Recurring questions and weekly context updates

Data in transit between your browser and our servers is encrypted via TLS 1.3. Voice presence files are stored in encrypted object storage with restricted access.

The encryption keys are stored separately from the data they protect. Decryption only occurs at the moment data is needed, for call handling, dashboard display, or summary generation, and only within our secure server environment.

No Training on Your Data

KindredMind will never use your conversations, your loved one's words, your voice recordings, your intake information, to train AI models. Not our models. Not third-party models. Not any model.

We are explicit about this with all of our AI providers. Our contracts include data processing agreements that prohibit training on customer data. This is not a preference, it is a contractual requirement we enforce with every vendor in our stack.

Your interview-session recordings, the raw audio used to build your voice, are automatically deleted within 24 hours of your voice model being ready. Your voice model itself can be deleted anytime from your dashboard and is permanently removed within thirty days of your request. Call transcripts are encrypted and automatically deleted after 90 days.

When you delete your data, through the account settings or by closing your account, it is permanently removed from our systems and from the systems of our providers. We do not retain backups of deleted user data beyond the standard 30-day recovery window.

Care Circle Plan

The Care Circle plan lets up to four caregivers share one subscription and one knowledge base. Here is how we handle data within a care circle, and what each member can and cannot access:

• Shared knowledge base. All care circle members contribute to and read from a single shared knowledge base about your loved one. Any member can add or update entries. This is by design, consistency of care depends on a single, shared picture.
• Separate voice data. Each caregiver's interview recordings and voice presence are entirely their own. No other member can access, hear, or modify another member's voice presence. Voice data is owned by the individual caregiver and deleted only when that caregiver closes their account or removes their voice model.
• Separate dedicated numbers. Each care circle member has their own dedicated phone number. Call logs, transcripts, and summaries for calls to your number are visible to you and are not automatically shared with other circle members.
• Circle owner billing. The care circle owner holds the Stripe subscription and is the billing contact. Members who join via invite code are not charged and have no access to billing information.
• Leaving the circle. If a member leaves the care circle, their voice model and their call history remain with their account. Their contributions to the shared knowledge base remain with the circle. The circle owner may remove a member at any time; the removed member's access to the shared knowledge base ends immediately.

All care circle data is subject to the same encryption, retention, and deletion commitments described on this page. The fact that data is shared within a circle does not change how we store or protect it.

Call Safety Protocols

Every call handled by KindredMind goes through a real-time safety layer that runs from the first word to the last. It is not a post-call review. It is built into the call-handling engine itself, analyzing conversation as it happens and acting before the call ends if it needs to.

What triggers an alert

KindredMind monitors every call for two things in parallel: a set of built-in phrases associated with physical emergencies, and a broader AI analysis that catches distress, fear, confusion, and safeguarding concerns that no fixed keyword list could anticipate.

The built-in emergency phrases include things like:

These phrases always active. You cannot turn them off entirely, but you can mute up to 10 of them from your dashboard settings if a specific phrase is a false alarm for your loved one — for example, if they say "you have my heart" constantly. Muting a phrase removes it from keyword detection only; the broader AI analysis still runs.

You can also add your own custom trigger words from dashboard settings. These are additive: they layer on top of the built-in list, not instead of it. A word you add triggers the same alert sequence as any built-in phrase.

When a keyword is matched, a second AI pass confirms whether it is a real physical emergency happening right now or a benign mention — a memory, an idiom, a story. When in doubt, it treats it as real. Missing a real fall is a worse outcome than a false alarm.

What happens when an emergency is detected

The moment a real emergency is confirmed, five things happen simultaneously:

• 📱
  SMS to your phone. An immediate text message to your caregiver number with what was heard and a direct link to your dashboard. This goes out regardless of the time of day, even during your configured quiet hours.
• 📲
  SMS to your backup contacts. Every backup contact you have added in your emergency settings receives the same immediate text message. This also goes out regardless of the time of day or their individual quiet hour settings.
• 🔔
  Push notification to the KindredMind app. If you have the app installed and push notifications enabled, a high-priority alert fires immediately on your device.
• 📞
  Voice call to your phone. An automated voice call tells you there is an emergency and what your loved one needs — call 911, call the facility, or go to them at home, depending on your loved one's living situation. If you are in your configured quiet hours, the voice call skips you and starts the cascade below. The SMS always goes through.
• 🔗
  The companion stays on the line. The AI companion does not hang up. It switches into a quiet holding mode, repeating warmly: "Help is on the way. Stay calm. I love you." It will not say goodbye, will not end the call, and will not drift back into normal conversation. It stays until your loved one is no longer alone.

Backup contact voice cascade

If your primary caregiver number is in quiet hours or the call cannot be placed, KindredMind immediately moves through your backup contacts in the order you have set them, skipping any contact in their own quiet hours, until it reaches someone who can be called. If no one can be reached by phone, the alert is logged and marked unresolved so you can see it in your dashboard. SMS messages to all contacts go out regardless.

Other alert types

Not every alert is an emergency. KindredMind monitors for a range of call conditions and adjusts the notification accordingly:

• Elevated distress. If your loved one seems repeatedly frightened or distressed, but no emergency phrase is heard, you receive a push notification or email flagging the call for review. No SMS, no voice call — it is a heads-up, not an alarm.
• Serious distress (self-harm mention). If your loved one says anything suggesting they want to hurt themselves, you receive both a push notification and an immediate SMS. No voice call cascade — this is a moment that calls for a quiet, human check-in, not an alarm.
• Safeguarding concern. If your loved one mentions being hit, hurt, having things stolen, or mistreated by any staff member, you receive a push notification and an SMS asking you to review the call recording in your dashboard.
• Medication mention. If your loved one says anything about not receiving medication, taking the wrong one, or feeling unwell after medication, you receive a push notification flagging it for your attention.
• Mood and call summary. Every call records a mood reading (calm, chatty, anxious, confused, distressed, happy) and any flagged moments. You see everything in your dashboard after the call, even if no alert was sent during it.

No false promises

The companion will never tell your loved one you are on your way when you are not, that something will be arranged when it will not, or that a problem has been fixed when it has not. It operates within honest limits. When an emergency is confirmed and the escalation sequence is running, the companion says exactly one thing: help is on the way, stay calm. That is the only promise it makes — and it is one the system is actively working to keep.

Post-call review

Every call generates a full summary: key topics discussed, any flagged moments, the mood reading, and your loved one's language patterns if anything notable was observed. Nothing is hidden. The transcript is there if you want it, and the summary is there if you do not. Anything flagged during the call that did not trigger a real-time alert is highlighted in the summary so you can decide whether it warrants follow-up.

Your Control Over the System

You are in control of KindredMind at all times. There are two modes:

• Support Me: Calls ring your real number first for the number of rings you choose. If you do not pick up, KindredMind answers in the voice you chose. Set the ring count to 0 to have KindredMind answer immediately.
• Cover for Me: KindredMind handles every call. Your phone stays quiet, and you receive a summary after each one.

You can switch between modes instantly from your dashboard. If you are having a moment, if you want to take every call yourself today, or if you want to be completely off-grid, the system adapts immediately.

You can also export all of your data at any time from account settings. This includes your intake form, knowledge base, call transcripts, and account information, in a single JSON file. You own this data. You can take it with you.

Our Privacy Commitments in Plain Language

Third-Party Providers

KindredMind uses a small set of carefully selected third-party providers. We have data processing agreements with each of them that explicitly prohibit training on customer data.

• Our voice technology partner, Voice synthesis and text-to-speech. Your voice recordings are processed and stored securely within KindredMind's account. They are not shared with other customers and are never used for training.
• Our AI call infrastructure partner, Conversational AI and real-time call handling. Manages call routing and transcription on our behalf.
• Our AI language model partner, for conversation and summary generation. Used under an API agreement that prohibits training on inputs.
• Our telephony infrastructure partner handles phone number provisioning and call routing. Does not store call content.
• Stripe, Payment processing. We never store full card numbers, Stripe handles all payment data directly.
• Our email delivery provider handles account verification and notification emails only.

We do not use advertising networks, analytics that track individuals across sites, or any provider whose business model depends on data monetization.

Reporting a Concern

If you have a privacy concern, a question about your data, or a safety issue with a call, please reach out directly at hello@kindredmind.care. We respond within 24 hours on business days.

If you believe there has been a data breach or a safety incident, contact us immediately at the same address and include "URGENT" in the subject line.

Further Reading

For the full legal details, see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. For our ethical framework around AI in dementia care, see Our Approach. For the question of whether AI is appropriate in this context at all, see Is It Ethical to Use AI for Dementia Care?