Companion
It knows she likes the Dodgers, and that her son's name is Jason.
The quiet hours between visits are where loneliness lives. Foreword's companion is somebody to talk to in those hours — and it's set up for each resident individually, so the conversation is actually about her.
Personalized per resident
Five things your care team tells it.
Not a personality setting. Not a tone slider. Specific facts about a specific person, entered by the people who know her, so the companion arrives already knowing who it's talking to.
What she likes to talk about
Baseball, the garden she used to keep, forty years of teaching. The companion brings them up naturally instead of asking her to carry the conversation.
Who to ask after
Her son Jason, her sister in Tucson, the grandchildren. It can gently ask how they are — the way a visitor who'd been before would.
What she can and can't do
So it never suggests something physically unsafe. A companion that cheerfully proposes a walk to someone who can't stand isn't company. It's a hazard.
How to be gentle
Where there's memory loss or disorientation, it's told to be extra patient — not to argue, not to correct harshly, but to reassure and redirect kindly.
Anything else
A free-text field for what doesn't fit a box. She doesn't like to be called Margaret. Don't mention the dog.
Used, out loud
It greets her by name. Small, and not small at all when it's the fourth voice you've heard all day.
It's still a nurse call
The companion is listening for more than conversation.
Emergencies escalate immediately
Mid-conversation, she says:
I fell earlier and I didn't tell anyone.
That's matched on the device itself, before any language model gets a vote. Urgent alert, spoken reassurance, staff on the way. Deterministic, local, every time.
Concerns get flagged
Softer signals reach staff too:
I haven't been sleeping. I get dizzy when I stand up.
Raised as a concern with the transcript attached, so a nurse can decide whether it's nothing or the start of something.
Residents are told what the companion does. It's a supportive presence, not a therapist and not a clinician, and it never pretends to be a person.
Local
Her conversations stay in the building.
The companion runs on a language model hosted on your own hardware. What she tells it about her marriage, her health, or her worst night this month isn't sent to an AI vendor to be logged, retained, or trained on. It doesn't leave.
That's also why it still works when your internet doesn't — which matters, because the hours when somebody most needs to talk are rarely the hours when IT is in the office.
And she can turn it off
Company, not company you didn't ask for.
Two of the five privacy levels keep the companion quiet. A resident who wants fall detection and a call button and absolutely no chat can have exactly that, chosen from her own phone, without a conversation about it.