MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

I made an eink rpi display for staying in touch with my parents, inspired by the poetry clock (https://www.theverge.com/23669343/ai-clock-chatgpt-poems-rhy...).

My dad didn't like poetry clock, but he does like image gen. So we got a (color) Inky Impression 7.3 and hooked it up to an RPi.

I made a basic telegram bot that you could send a verbal prompt to ("snowy day"). It would then ask which of your favorite artist styles it should create an image in. I found that presenting a list of two styles combined had cooler results. The prompt would be used to fetch a random quote on the topic, and quote and style would then be feed to stable diffusion, and maybe 30 seconds later you have fresh art and a quote on the display.

My dad then asked if we just could forward images directly there. He prefers, each day, to post an image of whatever the day is (November 13 is "World Kindness Day") and occasionally share a family photo. My mom looks forward to seeing what day he picks every day.

This is such a wonderful story, and I'm so happy that the author found something which worked well for their mom.

> Despite her amnesia, my mom came to remember that this display exits and what it’s for. She looks forward to seeing updates from her children on it.

This is the most interesting part for me here. Brains are such wondrous things. Would be cool to know if this is a special quirk of her mom or this is something which can help others like her too.

Understanding that the condition is rare enough that most of us really don't have a need to prepare for it, I wonder if there are any habits one could cultivate that would make it easier to live with amnesia. Learning new things is my favorite past time and strongest coping mechanism, so the though of not being able to do that anymore is up there with locked-in syndrome on my list of greatest living fears.

For example, I am already in the habit of logging every phone call to any doctor's offices or important contacts as they're happening. Being able to refer back to all the notes has helped me manage a number of complex errors. I know the name of the person I spoke to, the date, and what we discussed. Any time I need to make a call about a topic or to a company, I have an easy way to pull up all the past notes.

I'd like to think if I ever got amnesia, already having this system in place would serve me really well if I couldn't learn new things. I have the old things, and the habit of referring to and adding new things to the list.

But I wonder what else would or wouldn't be useful to try to practice now?

Does any commercial version of this exist? Using an existing tablet makes the DIY aspect a little less but then you have to roll your own site as well.

Really nice project. One idea for “if we fail to take down a message that no longer applies, it confuses her.” Put a start and end date/time on messages and implement in the board. That way you can pre schedule them and have them fall off automatically.