My Mom Has Dementia and Keeps Calling. Here Is Why I Built KindredMind.

"I was in a meeting and I couldn't answer the phone. And I knew it wouldn't end there. The phone kept ringing and ringing.

My mom is 82. She lives about 15 minutes from me in a care home. I visit her almost every day. She has frontotemporal and vascular dementia. And she calls a lot. Sometimes 10 times before lunch. And that's okay."

She's not doing it to be difficult

"One thing I want to be clear: my mom isn't doing it to be difficult or make me feel guilty. She's scared. And the only thing that seems to calm her is my voice."

What is happening in Sharon's brain when she picks up the phone is not a behavioural choice. It is the disease. Frontotemporal dementia damages the parts of the brain that hold a sense of safety in place from one moment to the next. When you talk to her and tell her everything is fine, the relief is real, but there is no mechanism to store it. A few minutes later the anxiety resets completely. The call she just made, and the reassurance inside it, are gone. Each new call arrives as urgent as the first. This is what clinicians describe as dementia separation anxiety, and the Alzheimer Society of Canada's communication guidelines for dementia care recommend validation therapy as the clinical response: meet the feeling, not the literal question.

This pattern runs in my family

"And I am all too familiar with this pattern. This happened to her mom, my grandmom. The difference is now I have three kids, two dogs, a marriage, and a career, and I visit her almost every day. So it's a lot."

The calls I couldn't get to were the hardest

"I find I'm answering the call all the time, from everywhere. I would be jumping out of the shower to take her call. I'd step out of my daughter's dance recital to take her call. But really it was the calls that I couldn't get to that were the hardest, because I felt I might be missing something, or she might feel abandoned. So it was those that left a lot of guilt in me and concern."

The guilt from missed dementia calls is one of the most documented and least discussed parts of caregiving. It does not appear in the brochure. It builds quietly in the gaps between rings, in the moment you decide not to pick up because you cannot pick up, and it stays with you long after the phone goes silent. For many primary caregivers, it is the symptom that finally pushes them toward caregiver burnout.

There's no real solution. And no one tells you that.

"And there's something that no one tells you: there's no real solution.

I tried scheduling calls, but as the disease progressed, that stopped working. I tried going stretches of time to be more productive, just to get work done, but then the guilt would just sit with me. I looked into call blocking but that didn't fix it for my mom knowing that she was sitting in fear. It just felt like all the options meant I was either choosing my life or hers."

Every existing option addresses the caregiver and not the person with dementia. Scheduling, restricting access, blocking the line, sending things to voicemail. Each one does something to or for the caregiver. Not one of them puts a warm familiar voice on the other end of the line for the person who is calling. A 2025 randomized controlled trial published on PubMed (PubMed 38646703) found meaningful reductions in anxiety and agitation when people with dementia received familiar voice support compared to routine care alone. The clinical name for this approach is simulated presence therapy: the consistent presence of a trusted voice that resolves the underlying need rather than suppressing the call.

The only thing that made sense

"The only thing that ended up really making sense is that the thing that makes her feel calm is hearing my voice. So KindredMind was born from that."

Kirstin Thomas built KindredMind with co-founder Patrick Armstrong. KindredMind is an voice companion for dementia families that answers calls in the family caregiver's voice, built around simulated presence therapy and the Alzheimer Society of Canada's communication guidelines for dementia care.

KindredMind knows Sharon's fears, her repeated questions, the things that calm her, the rhythms of her day. It answers every call as Kirstin. Not as a recording. In her voice, in real time, with the right words for the moment. Each call is wrapped in warmth. Kirstin gets a report after each conversation, so she is always in the know about what Sharon needed, what was said, and how the call ended.

What I wasn't expecting

"What I wasn't expecting was that now when I go to visit my mom, I'm not walking through that door carrying the weight of every missed call. I'm there showing up as myself. And I'm present. And that's the version she deserves.

If this feels familiar at all to you, if you have a loved one who keeps calling and you don't know how you're going to go on fielding all the calls, we built this for you."