Projects #
Caregiver Companion GPT #
In an estimated 36.5 million households across the country an adult is providing unpaid care to a family member according to the “Caregiving in the U.S.” study by the National Alliance for Caregiving.
There's an enormous body of literature and resources available on the web for navigating the caregiving experience, and I wanted to create a tool that would help serve as a quick reference for navigating the process. Questions like:
- What should I know about caring for someone with alzheimers, specifically on the topic of financial planning and personal care agreements? example answer
- In New York, what resources are available to caregivers? example answer
- How do I deal with caregiver burnout? example answer
- How do I begin talking with my parents about their end of life care? example answer
Googling this information is tough when a great deal of this knowledge is locked up in huge publications, behind advertising, and hidden in PDFs on government websites. This tool is a hopes to bubble up techniques and strategies to help caregivers access this information.
When OpenAI announced custom GPT models, I kept encountering GPTs built for Open AI's demographic: 'custom websites', 'help creating Excel formulas'... etc... but for one of the most challenging aspects of life on Earth -- caregiving -- especially in the U.S. -- I wanted to test if a tool like this would be actually useful. I've done a great deal of testing, prompt crafting and work on this and I hope it's useful to others.
Visit the Caregiver Companion #
This custom GPT has been primed with a custom prompt that is designed to help caregivers with their day-to-day activities. It includes tools for planning, tracking, and managing tasks, as well as resources for finding support and information about mental health issues. Beyond the custom prompt, the GPT also has extensive knowledge about common issues caretakers encounter as they assist ailing adults. Answers improve as questions it receives improve, so the more detail provided in your questions the better.
The GPT has been trained on free resources published by leading elder care resources:
- US Department of Health & Human Services National Institute on Aging - Caregiver's Handbook
- Medicare.gov - Medicare and You Handbook
- Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement - Financial Steps for Caregivers: What You Need to Know About Protecting Your Money and Retirement
- Alzheimer's Family Center
- And more. If you'd like to suggest something, please reach out. At the moment it is geared towards U.S. caregivers.
I will say that I'm aware of all the issues that this type of service poses:
- Large language models can hallucinate and they are also seeking to soak up more information to improve their models. Their training data inevitably consists of material under copyright. Questions asked of LLMs may be used to train future models at Open AI. It's not super easy to opt out but that is one way to ensure that your questions and data do not get used, even anonymously, for financial gain. What I recommend is keeping history on, but turning off model training by following these steps.
- I don't intend for this model to be used for healthcare (medical) advice. Caregiving as a practice is a very personal thing, but it also requires a great deal of logistics, record keeping, mental health check-ins, and emotional intelligence. This model may answer empathically, but it's still just spicy autocorrect.
- Finding a balance between data protection and finding help for caregiving questions is a huge discussion. If I wasn't impressed with the answers I've received from this tool I wouldn't make it public.
Moonphase Generator #
Building a service to show "what's today's moonphase" was a fun project. Today the moon looks like: 
Learn more here.