2024-11-14 event date. A personal project described on Jan Miksovsky’s site offers a rare look at how a modest piece of consumer hardware, a simple website, and careful iteration can become a practical support tool for someone living with amnesia. The setup, nicknamed MomBoard, centers on an e-ink display placed in the author’s mother’s apartment to help her keep track of reassuring messages from family. The source says the system had been running successfully for two years at the time of the post and had become reliable enough to share as a reference for others facing similar caregiving situations.
The backstory is specific and medically important. After a long surgery in June 2022, the author’s mother developed permanent anterograde amnesia. She can no longer form new long-term memories, and because of that she quickly loses track of calls, texts, and other short-term reminders. That created a cycle of anxiety: she would repeatedly worry that her grown children had not been in contact, even after they had just spoken. Paper notes and ordinary reminders failed because they were either misplaced or forgotten almost immediately.
The response was to rethink the problem as a user-interface challenge rather than a care-plan abstraction. The author looked for a tablet-sized e-ink device with Wi-Fi and a browser, found a Boox Note Air2, and confirmed it could launch directly into a designated webpage. The report emphasizes that the device was visually unobtrusive, legible from a distance, and suitable for a home environment. A stand made it feel more like a framed object than a gadget, which helped the screen blend into the apartment rather than dominate it.
The software behind the display was intentionally small. The source says the site had two pages: one for displaying the board and one for composing messages. The author kept the stack mostly to vanilla HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript so that it would be easy to maintain, resilient over months of operation, and debuggable despite the constraints of a remote e-ink device. The setup also used a minimal storage service for the messages themselves, making it possible to update content remotely while keeping the system simple.
Several design choices reveal the project’s practical focus. To reduce the risk of burn-in, the board changes where messages appear. The date and time alternate positions for the same reason. The text size is calculated dynamically so short notes and longer messages both fit. The compose page was designed for phones so family members could update it quickly from anywhere. In other words, the project did not treat accessibility as a generic slogan; it built the display around the realities of family communication and memory loss.
The result, as described in the source, is not a polished product but a durable workaround that solves a real problem. It shows how a consumer e-reader, a tiny web app, and a thoughtful interface can become a stabilizing part of daily life for someone who needs repeated reassurance.
The project’s durability is what makes it newsworthy beyond the family itself. A system that runs for years, survives forgetfulness, and can be updated remotely shows how low-tech interfaces still solve high-stakes problems when they are designed with care. The source does not present MomBoard as a universal answer to caregiving, but it does show that modest tools can reduce daily distress in ways that elaborate platforms sometimes fail to do. The lesson is less about gadgets than about attention to human routines.
