"MeBo Leaves a Piece of You Behind": Designing a Relational Voice-Based Memory Companion for Older Adults

arXiv:2609.24706 · cs.HC, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-21 · Read on arXiv

cs.HC, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-21

Updated: 2026-09-21

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Autobiographical remembering supports identity, well-being, and social connection in later life, yet voice-based memory technologies largely rely on isolated prompts.

Terminology

Design Strategies — 22× in this paper
Archetype — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Personalization — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Grounding — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Core — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Benchmark — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Perceived Empathy of Technology Scale — 2× in this paper
Accountability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Agentic Architecture — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Agentic Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
Cosine Similarity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Frustration — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
MIT Media Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 1× in this paper
Memory Augmentation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Multimodal Integration — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Nadia — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule — 1× in this paper
Provenance — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
RAG — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — 1× in this paper · explained in 16 episodes
Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Abstract

Autobiographical remembering supports identity, well-being, and social connection in later life, yet voice-based memory technologies largely rely on isolated prompts. We designed and built MeBo, a fully functional relational voice-based memory companion, through participatory design with 11 older adults. Their accounts shaped four Design Strategies that guided MeBo's interaction design and multi-agent implementation. In a mixed-methods evaluation with 20 older adults, participants found MeBo exceptionally usable (SUS = 87.75), enjoyable, sociable, emotionally responsive, and trustworthy. Participants reported higher positive affect and momentary social connection and lower negative affect after the session than before. Participants described how MeBo followed their stories, returned to earlier memories, adapted to their preferences, and made its growing memory visible and controllable. MeBo's relational framing surfaces tensions around what it should remember, who may access memories produced through interaction, and what becomes of them when the user or MeBo is no longer present.

Terminology

Abstract

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