YourAvatarAI companionship designed for care

Your Avatar began with a simple but difficult question: how can AI genuinely support people experiencing loneliness, isolation and early-stage dementia?

The founding team already worked in end of life and memory preservation technology through a sister business focused on capturing life stories and digital legacies. That experience exposed a broader opportunity. Not just preserving memories after someone is gone, but using AI to improve wellbeing while they are still here.

The vision became an AI-powered companionship platform built specifically for elderly users, particularly those in the early stages of dementia who still want connection, conversation and familiarity. But building for this audience meant more than adding AI to an app. The product needed to feel emotionally safe. Simple. Human. Useful for care homes, families and elderly users all at once.

&above partnered with Your Avatar to turn an early stage prototype into a scalable platform ready for real world care environments.

Your Avatar is an AI-powered companionship platform designed to support elderly users experiencing loneliness, isolation, and the early stages of dementia. The product combines conversational AI with avatar technology to create more human, emotionally engaging interactions for people who may otherwise lack consistent companionship.

The founding team already operated within the end of life and legacy tech space through a related business focused on preserving personal memories and stories. That experience revealed a broader opportunity: using AI and avatar technology not only to preserve memories after life, but to improve wellbeing during life.

The challenge wasn't the avatar technology itself but everything around it. The platform had to support multiple user types simultaneously:

• Elderly users interacting with companions
• Family members creating avatars for loved ones
• Care home staff managing accounts
• Potential direct to consumer users creating companions for themselves

That created a surprisingly complex product ecosystem.

At the same time, the audience demanded a completely different approach to UX. Most digital products assume confident, technically fluent users, Your Avatar couldn't. The experience needed to work for people experiencing cognitive decline, low technical confidence or major life changes like moving into care homes. Every interaction had to feel calm, understandable and natural.

Accessibility wasn't treated as a compliance exercise - iIt shaped the entire product.

Like many startups, Your Avatar wanted to leave room for future opportunities.

The platform needed to support both B2B care home deployment. It also needed flexibility around how companionship worked:

• Family managed accounts
• Self-created avatars
• Shared family access
• Care home administration
• Different onboarding journeys depending on the user

That flexibility came with trade offs. Building for every possible future scenario increased technical complexity, expanded user journeys and slowed the path to market.

Throughout the engagement, &above worked closely with the client to balance ambition with practical MVP thinking. Rather than building endless functionality upfront, the focus became validating care home adoption quickly, simplifying operational workflows, prioritising real user value and creating a launch ready product that could evolve post launch. The result was a more focused product strategy designed around learning from real world use.

The design process centred around empathy for older users. The team continuously tested whether the product felt intuitive, not just technically functional - Would a care home manager feel this adds friction to their day? Would an elderly user feel comforted or confused? Would conversations feel natural or unsettling? Those questions shaped everything from onboarding flows to interaction patterns. The product was intentionally simplified with clear navigation, minimal setup complexity, reduced cognitive load, natural conversational flows and voice-led interactions where possible.

The goal wasn't to make AI feel futuristic, it was to make it feel familiar.

For the AI companion to feel personal, it needed context. Family members needed a way to teach the avatar about childhood memories, important life events, family relationships, personality traits and stories worth remembering.

Originally, the onboarding process was envisaged to include up to 200 questions bu the problem was obvious immediately. Nobody was realistically going to complete a 200 question form, so the team redesigned the experience completely. Instead of lengthy data entry, the onboarding became a guided storytelling experience. Structured prompts encouraged users to speak naturally:

• “Tell us about a memory they love sharing.”
• “What made their childhood special?”
• “What story always makes them smile?”

The interface blended typing, voice recording and flexible completion over time. Rather than feeling like admin, the process became more reflective and emotionally engaging. Internally, the feature became known as the enrichment flow - one of the clearest examples of collaborative product thinking across the project.

When &above joined the project, an early avatar prototype already existed through a separate technology partner. The prototype proved the concept, but it wasn't production ready. Front end and back end systems were tightly coupled, making integration difficult and limiting scalability.

The team worked closely with the technology partner to redefine responsibilities, establish clean API boundaries and create a scalable architecture suitable for a commercial product. Partway through development, the avatar technology itself also evolved. The original CGI style avatars generated from still images were replaced with looping video based avatars that felt significantly more realistic.

The upgrade improved the experience dramatically, but also introduced major rework across the platform. The product, UX and engineering teams adapted quickly to support the new avatar system while maintaining momentum towards launch.

The project also became an opportunity for &above to push its own AI-enabled delivery workflows. Across design, engineering and QA, the team used modern AI tooling to accelerate delivery, improve testing and reduce repetitive manual work. This included AI-assisted engineering workflows and automated QA approaches that helped the team move faster within startup timelines and budgets.

At the same time, the project created valuable real-world learning around conversational AI behaviour. The team explored how to balance, conversational realism, emotional warmth, factual consistency, unpredictability and personal memory recall, whilst maintaining safety guardrails. The AI needed to feel human enough to engage users while remaining accurate about important personal details.

Those learnings continue to shape how &above approaches AI product design today.

The project brought together Your Avatar, &above and the avatar technology partner with regular in-person collaboration helping maintain alignment throughout. That mattered.

Projects involving multiple technical partners can easily become fragmented, especially when responsibilities overlap. Instead, the teams worked collaboratively through technical decisions, UX challenges and product prioritisation. The relationship reflected &above's broader approach to product partnerships. Not just delivering tickets, but contributing strategic product thinking, UX direction, roadmap prioritisation, AI implementation guidance and MVP decision-making throughout the engagement.

The first version of Your Avatar was designed around a clear goal: landing initial care-home partnerships and validating the product in live environments. The MVP focused on helping care providers introduce AI companionship with minimal operational overhead while creating meaningful engagement for residents.

The platform was built to support care home pilot programmes, early commercial adoption, measurable wellbeing feedback, future roadmap iteration and long-term B2C expansion. Rather than treating launch as the finish line, the product was intentionally designed as the beginning of a longer learning cycle.

Real world usage will shape future iterations around engagement quality, emotional response, onboarding behaviour, care-home adoption and long-term retention. For &above, the project reinforced a core belief: AI products succeed when they feel genuinely useful, emotionally intelligent and human, not simply technologically impressive.