As a doctor, I generally think it is wise to steer clear of party politics. So my reason for mentioning the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, today has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Sadly, his father, Roy, died recently after living with Alzheimer’s disease. Andy Burnham has spoken openly about the effect dementia has had on his family and has previously supported dementia causes. It struck a chord with me. Dementia is no respecter of status, wealth or background. However much support a family has available, watching somebody you love develop dementia is extraordinarily difficult. It affects the person with the condition, of course, but its effects spread throughout a family, and every family’s experience is different. Dementia can begin relatively young or very late in life. It can progress rapidly or much more slowly. Some people retain a great deal of independence for years, while others deteriorate much more quickly. Behaviour, language, memory, anxiety and personality can all be affected in different ways. Unfortunately, my own family has had first-hand experience of this.
Looking back, the signs were there. When I think back now, my mum probably had subtle signs for several years before it became obvious what was happening. One of the first things I remember was during a family weekend away for my dad’s belated 70th birthday. Covid had delayed the celebrations, so this must now have been about five years ago. We had rented a house in the countryside and Mum became strangely preoccupied with a few things about the house. Nothing dramatic happened. She was just behaving in a way that was slightly out of character. My wife and I noticed it and mentioned it, but didn’t think very much more about it.
Her hearing was also very poor. We eventually persuaded her to have it tested and, unsurprisingly, she was advised to wear hearing aids. She wasn’t terribly receptive to the idea. Hearing loss is now recognised as one of a number of potentially modifiable factors associated with dementia risk. Of course, that doesn’t mean I can say what role, if any, it played in Mum’s illness. But it is something I have thought about since. I have previously written a whole series about dementia — what dementia actually is, its different causes, what we know about treatment, and the things we can do throughout life that may reduce our risk.
Over the following couple of years, however, it became increasingly clear that something was wrong. One of the difficulties many families will recognise is that the person affected doesn’t necessarily recognise it themselves. Mum had always been very independent and strong-willed. The suggestion that she might need to see somebody for a memory assessment was simply not something she was prepared to entertain. That can leave families in a very difficult position. Everyone around somebody may be able to see that things are changing, yet actually getting them assessed and helped can be remarkably difficult.
Mum also became increasingly anxious about leaving the house. One example particularly sticks in my mind. My parents have always loved Formula One. They watched almost every Grand Prix on television, but they were also from a generation that was careful with money and regarded actually attending a race as something of an extravagance. Eventually however they bought tickets for the British Grand Prix. Then, on the morning they were due to go, Mum suddenly produced a reason why she couldn’t possibly leave the house. Neither of them went. I remember how upset my dad was at the time. Looking back now, I suspect it wasn’t really about the reason she gave us at all. It was probably anxiety associated with her dementia.
That pattern became progressively more obvious. She wanted to go out less. Her language deteriorated and word-finding became increasingly difficult. She developed repetitive behaviours and would repeat familiar phrases which sounded superficially plausible but contained very little information. There were nights when she wandered around the house and occasionally tried to leave, so doors had to be kept locked.
One of the extraordinary things about dementia is that people can sometimes still appear remarkably normal during a brief social interaction. Someone who didn’t know Mum well might have spoken to her for a few minutes and thought there was very little wrong. Those of us who knew her could see a very different picture.
The effect on the person caring for them is something we need to talk about more as a society in my view. Gradually, the burden on my dad became enormous. He had spent around 50 years living with Mum and was suddenly not simply her husband but effectively her full-time carer. My dad is from a generation that generally just gets on with things. In my entire childhood and adult life, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had seen him cry. Yet during this period he was frequently tearful. I was calling him every day and could hear how exhausted he was becoming.
Eventually Mum moved into a nursing home. That relieved some of the immediate pressure, but it created another enormous adjustment. Dad had gone from living with somebody for five decades to suddenly living alone. I don’t live nearby, so I did what I could. I visited. I phoned him every day. Gradually, things got easier. Thankfully, he is now doing much better, but a new worry appeared for me.
Dad remains fiercely independent, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, that independence sometimes includes climbing ladders, getting the power tools out or deciding that a bit of broken guttering really ought to be repaired immediately – all things which perhaps become slightly less sensible as you approach 80. So I worried about him. I could phone him or text him every day, and for a while, I did, but the reality is that neither of us necessarily wants a compulsory telephone conversation every single day. Sometimes I am busy. Sometimes he is busy. Sometimes there really isn’t very much to say. Sometimes we forgot. What I actually wanted was much simpler.
I didn’t need to speak to Dad every day. I just wanted to know that he was OK.
I looked for an app that would do that. There were apps offering various combinations of messaging, location tracking, monitoring and other features, but I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to track Dad. I didn’t want cameras. I didn’t want surveillance, and I certainly didn’t want something complicated, because technology that involves lots of menus, passwords or settings is more likely to create stress than reassurance. I wanted something incredibly simple. So, in the end, I decided to build it.
DailyOK
The result is an app called DailyOK. It really does do almost exactly what the name suggests. Once each day, the person checks in and taps one of three options:
Great.
OK.
Low.
That’s essentially it. The person looking out for them receives the update. You can choose the time of day at which you would like the check-in to happen. If the person doesn’t check in, you get a notification about that too. With Dad, we do it in the morning. Most mornings, a notification appears on my phone telling me he’s feeling ‘Great’. It is a surprisingly nice little moment in my day. I can carry on with whatever I am doing knowing that Dad is up, has his phone with him and feels well. If he puts ‘OK’, I’ll usually give him a call. Often it is something fairly trivial. Perhaps he hasn’t slept very well or something has irritated him that morning, but it prompts me to check. If he ever selected ‘low’, I would obviously want to know why. There has only been one occasion so far when he failed to check in altogether. It turned out that he’d left his mobile phone somewhere. I called his house phone, discovered everything was fine, and that was that. Exactly what I had wanted the app to do.
It doesn’t replace talking to someone, which I think is important. DailyOK isn’t intended to replace human contact. I still speak to Dad regularly. We will usually have a proper telephone conversation every few days and, of course, we see each other too. Nor is it an emergency monitoring service. It is simply another small layer of reassurance between those conversations. In some ways it reminds me of the old Ronseal advert that both Dad’s generation and mine will probably remember. It does exactly what it says on the tin. No tracking. No camera. No complicated messaging system. Just a simple way for somebody to say:
I’m OK today.
Building an app turns out not to be particularly cheap. It also turns out to take rather longer than I imagined. I first started working on DailyOK around nine months ago at the start of 2026. The iPhone version was built several months ago, and Dad and I have been using beta versions of it throughout much of that time while we tested it, changed things and ironed out the inevitable problems. Getting the Android version working properly and through the Google Play process took longer still, and there have been numerous refinements along the way. So although I have personally been using DailyOK every day for months, it has only very recently become properly available to everyone through the standard Apple and Google app stores. That also explains why, as I write this, you may not see lots of downloads or glowing reviews attached to it yet. It is, genuinely, a new launch.
My own review, admittedly from a rather biased reviewer, is extremely positive. Even if hardly anybody else ever downloaded it, I would still consider the money well spent because it solved a genuine problem in my own life. Apart from the New York Times Wordle app (which I confess I complete rather religiously) DailyOK is the only app on my phone that I can genuinely say I have used every single day for months, and unlike Wordle, it gives me something rather more valuable than discovering that today’s five-letter word contains an unexpectedly placed vowel.
It gives me reassurance that Dad is OK.
I suspect our family’s situation is far from unique. You might have an elderly parent living alone. You might be looking out for a relative who values their independence and doesn’t want to feel monitored. Or perhaps you are the person living alone and would simply like an easy way of reassuring your children or family each day without having to make a telephone call.
Either person can set DailyOK up. It is now available through both the Apple App Store and Google Play, with a seven-day free trial. There are individual and family options depending on whether you are checking in with one person or several.
Download DailyOK on the App Store
I built DailyOK for my dad and me, but given how many families are facing the same questions around ageing parents, independence and living alone, I hope it might prove useful to some of you as well. If it provides somebody else with the same little moment of reassurance I get every morning when my phone tells me that Dad is doing great, then I will be very pleased that I built it.
One last thing. I’ve recorded a short video about why I built DailyOK, my daily check-in app for families, in case you’d like to watch it: https://youtu.be/i7BJKYvRHy8. You can also read more at https://www.coastalcardiology.co.uk/dailyok/