About the Author
Kirstin Thomas
Co-founder, KindredMind
Dementia caregiver
Ontario, Canada
Meet Kirstin Thomas, KindredMind's co-founder. In this 3-minute
introduction, Kirstin shares her own story as the daughter of
a parent with frontotemporal dementia and the lived experience
that shapes everything KindredMind builds.
Co-founder of KindredMind. Caregiver to my mom, Sharon. Firsthand accounts of caring for a loved one living with dementia and the effects of stroke.
Kirstin Thomas is the co-founder of KindredMind and a dementia caregiver. Kirstin's mother, Sharon, lives with frontotemporal dementia and, following an ischaemic stroke, now uses a wheelchair. Kirstin holds legal decision-making authority for Sharon's personal care. She visits Sharon almost every day and built KindredMind to answer the calls that come in between, the ones she simply cannot always get to. This way, Sharon always hears her daughter's voice, even when Kirstin can't pick up.
Who I Am
I'm Kirstin Thomas, the co-founder of KindredMind and the caregiver for my mom Sharon, who is 82. I'm 50, I live in Ontario, Canada, and I'm an only child. It has always been just the two of us. In 2026, I co-founded KindredMind with Patrick Armstrong because, as much as I was trying to meet her needs, I knew I couldn't do it on my own.
I have three children, two dogs, a marriage, and a career. Before KindredMind, I was also running two households, driving my mother to every appointment, and answering her calls as many times a day as she needed. It wasn't sustainable.
My Caregiving Experience
It was a fall in 2023 that prompted us to get some imaging done, and the scans revealed minor frontotemporal lobe atrophy. We had already moved her closer to us during COVID, anticipating what was coming. Through 2024 and into 2025, I took over the logistics of her life: the gym, appointments, visits with friends, groceries, the cat's vet.
In April 2025, her MoCA score had fallen enough that her doctors reported her to the Ministry of Transportation. Her license was suspended. She appealed, studied for the retest, and failed. She sold her car that summer. That was the beginning of the real caregiving.
In October 2025, Sharon began having TIAs, transient ischaemic attacks. The second one happened in my family kitchen. That was the last time she was fully herself. On November 2nd, 2025, following several TIA episodes, Sharon had a stroke that severely impacted the basal ganglia, the part of the brain responsible for movement, among other essential functions. She spent a month in the hospital and lost all mobility on her left side. She lost words, memories, and the ability to track time and context.
Today my mom is in a retirement home that can meet her care needs. I visit almost every day. I hold Power of Attorney for her personal care, which means I am the person legally responsible for decisions about her wellbeing — her facility, her care approaches, her daily life. Setting up KindredMind was one of those decisions. She still calls a lot, and I'm grateful for that. It's the calls I can't answer that weigh on me, when I'm in a meeting, driving, or chasing after my kids. She just needs to hear my voice. I get it. That gap is what KindredMind was built to fill.
My mom calls multiple times per day. She forgets she has called. Often, the anxiety that drove the initial call returns within minutes, and she calls again. Managing that, alongside everything else, is what led me to build KindredMind.
I visit my mom almost every day. KindredMind was never meant to replace that. It was built to handle the calls I cannot personally answer: the 7am calls when I'm trying to get my kids out the door, the calls during meetings, the calls during my daughter's dance performance. It answers in my voice, with my mom's history, with the specific reassurances that actually work for her.
Sharon's calls were not about information. They were about the anxiety that resets with every memory gap — she would forget she had called within minutes, and the urgency would return. What she needed was to hear my voice. That is the clinical basis of simulated presence therapy, and it is why voice cloning became the foundation of KindredMind rather than a call-blocking app. A 2025 peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial (PubMed 38646703) confirmed what we already knew from experience: that hearing a familiar family voice reduces agitation and dementia separation anxiety in ways that call blocking or redirection simply cannot.
Why I Write About Caregiving
Every article on KindredMind is written from lived experience, not research alone. I write about dementia caregiving, stroke recovery caregiving, caregiver burnout, caregiver guilt, and the specific challenge of managing repetitive calls because I have lived every one of these topics personally.
When I say something is hard, I've been there at 11 p.m., phone in hand, wondering how I'll get up and do it all again the next day. When I write about guilt, it's because I know what it's like to decline a call and then spend the rest of the day feeling like a terrible person. The experience behind these articles is real.
I write specifically about the phone call problem in dementia, the repetitive calling, the dementia separation anxiety that drives it, the burnout it produces in family caregivers. These are the things I live with, and the things I built a product to address. My writing tries to be honest about the research, honest about the limits of what we know, and honest about what it actually feels like to be the person on the other end of those calls.
I am not a clinician. I am a caregiver who happens to have built something, and who writes from that position. You can read more about why we built KindredMind and the story behind it. I reference peer-reviewed research, published guidelines from the Alzheimer Society of Canada and the Alzheimer's Association, and clinical frameworks like simulated presence therapy and validation therapy. But the lens I write through is always the lens of the family, not the facility.
Credentials & Experience
- Founder, KindredMind (2025 to present)
- Over 20 years of executive and founder experience, including President, Snaile Inc. (national smart mail technology company)
- Design degree, OCAD University, Toronto
- Active daily caregiver since 2025
- 2+ years navigating progressive cognitive decline and stroke caregiving
- Direct experience with: MoCA assessments, Ministry of Transportation cognitive reporting, TIA emergency care, basal ganglia stroke recovery, memory care home placement, caregiver burnout, and AI-assisted caregiving tools
- Based in Ontario, Canada
Articles by Kirstin Thomas
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Kirstin Thomas's caregiving experience with dementia?
Kirstin Thomas is the primary caregiver for her mother Sharon, who has frontotemporal dementia and stroke-related cognitive impairment. Sharon lives in a memory care home in Ontario. Kirstin visits almost every day and built KindredMind after experiencing firsthand the impact of repetitive calls driven by dementia separation anxiety — calls that continued regardless of how often she visited or answered.
What clinical research does KindredMind's approach draw on?
KindredMind is built on simulated presence therapy, a clinical approach supported by a 2025 peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial (PubMed 38646703) showing significant reductions in dementia-related agitation and separation anxiety when a familiar family voice responds to repetitive calls. KindredMind also follows the Alzheimer Society of Canada's published tips for dementia-friendly phone calls and validation therapy principles.
Who is Kirstin Thomas?
Kirstin Thomas is the co-founder of KindredMind and a dementia family caregiver. Her mother Sharon lives with frontotemporal dementia and, following an ischaemic stroke, now uses a wheelchair. She built KindredMind after experiencing the repetitive calling cycle firsthand and finding no existing solution that addressed it. You can read the full story on the why we built KindredMind page.
Why did Kirstin Thomas build KindredMind?
Kirstin built KindredMind because her mother Sharon was calling her up to ten times before lunch from her care home, often forgetting she had called. Kirstin could not always answer, and every missed call left Sharon's anxiety unresolved. KindredMind answers those calls in Kirstin's voice, so Sharon always reaches her daughter even when Kirstin cannot personally be there.
What does Kirstin Thomas write about?
Kirstin writes about dementia caregiving from lived experience, specifically the phone call problem in dementia, caregiver burnout, caregiver guilt, simulated presence therapy, and the emotional weight of caring for a parent with dementia. Her writing is grounded in both clinical research and her own daily experience as her mother's primary caregiver.