Hearthline — Product Brief (Jamaica-first)
Category: Family care across the island and the diaspora One-line: The household care OS that turns the paper from the clinic into the next four hours — and lets overseas family *see* it without sending money into a stranger’s app. MAIN launch feature: Care Radar — photograph a discharge note, prescription, or after-visit paper (UHWI, KPH, Cornwall Regional, a private GP, or a pharmacy label) and get a living, confidence-weighted plan for the next four hours, shareable into the family WhatsApp.
Works in Jamaica by design. No card. No portal login. No “pay to unlock Mummy’s meds.”
Phase 1 — Problem Discovery & Analysis
Pain point (Jamaica, with evidence)
Long-term care on the island is still mostly family, mostly women, and increasingly split across borders.
- About 15% of Jamaica’s population is 60+, and roughly 7% of older adults need help with at least one activity of daily living. Of functionally dependent older adults, about 58% receive care from a family member; in one nationally framed caregiver sample, 77% of carers were family or friends (IDB / national LTC review, *Aging and Long-Term Care in Jamaica*).
- About 244,000 residents are 65+ (8.6% of ~2.84 million). Formal continuing-care infrastructure is thin; informal family care is the default, and it is strained by emigration (Hope Research Group, 2025 senior-living note).
- Remittances are not a side channel. Inflows were US$3.49 billion in 2025 (~15.3% of GDP in the 2024 ratio the BOJ still cites). About two-thirds of those dollars come from the United States (BOJ remittance bulletin, Dec 2025; Jamaica Observer). Consultations for Jamaica’s dementia/LTC work already treat remittances as a primary out-of-pocket care fund (LSE / STRiDE-linked paper).
- The coordination layer families actually use is WhatsApp, not a caregiver app. Transnational Caribbean and African households already run aged-care through family WhatsApp groups — appointments, emergencies, and watching how remittance money is used (Baldassar-lineage WhatsApp care study; Jamaica digital-diaspora research on WhatsApp/Facebook kin ties).
- STATIN CPI July 2024: *Health* +0.2% on the month, +4.3% point-to-point. *Medicines and Health Products* +0.3% / +4.0%. Food still jumped — *Vegetables, tubers, plantains, cooking bananas and pulses* +7.4% in July alone (yellow yam, tomato, carrot, cabbage). Greater Kingston vegetables subclass +12.3% that month. Care is not only tablets; it is the pot on the stove. (STATIN CPI July 2024, released 15 Aug 2024.)
- STATIN CPI September 2024: Health still +0.3% month / +4.3% p2p; medicines +0.3% month. Food +6.9% point-to-point. (STATIN CPI September 2024, released 15 Oct 2024.)
The acute pain is the parking-lot / pharmacy-counter moment after a public-hospital discharge or a private consult: one person on the island holds the paper; the sister in Florida is asking “what them give her?”; a neighbour is offering to “help collect the tablets” — and that is exactly where remittance fraud and fake-helper stories live.
Market gap
Jamaica does not have a MyChart-shaped household OS. Public hospitals and many GPs still hand paper. Diaspora money arrives through Western Union, MoneyGram, Lynk, and bank transfer. The “apps” in the middle that ask for a card or a deposit look like scams — because some of them are.
The gap: turn the paper into the next four hours, keep the household as the system of record, and let overseas family look without sending funds through us.
Current solutions and limitations
| What people use | Strength | Why it fails the Jamaica moment |
|---|---|---|
| Family WhatsApp group | Already trusted, already paid-for in data | Photos of papers rot in the thread. No confidence, no “who has the 8 p.m. tablet,” no structured next four hours. |
| Voice notes + “call Auntie” | Human | Does not survive a night shift or a missed call. |
| Public hospital / NHF / pharmacy paper | Official | One copy, one person, easy to misread. |
| US caregiver apps (CaringBridge, Medisafe, etc.) | Polished | Card-first, portal-first, English-from-elsewhere, useless without MyChart. Feel like data harvests. |
| Informal paid helper found on Facebook | Sometimes works | Deposit-and-disappear risk. No shared evidence of what was agreed. |
| Diaspora “care concierge” pages | Speak the overseas language | Often ask for a wire *to a person*. That is the scam shape. |
Emerging technology enablers (that we will actually use here)
- On-device / private-cloud vision to read Jamaican clinic paper and pharmacy labels without a hospital IT contract.
- WhatsApp share (image + PDF) as the distribution bus — not a new social graph.
- PWA on Android (Digicel/FLOW Chrome) with offline cache. No App Store tax, no “download our APK from a link” (that *is* a scam pattern).
- Optional later: parish in-person helper badge via a credit union or church desk — never a crypto identity.
Blockchain is rejected for this product in Jamaica. A token next to “Mummy’s meds” is indistinguishable from a scam.
Phase 2 — Expert Lenses
Einstein — first principles
Assumption we kill: *care software starts with a US portal and a subscription wall.*
First principles: the unit of care in Jamaica is a confidence-weighted interval reconstructed from paper + a WhatsApp household, funded by remittance that must never enter this app. If confidence drops, we show uncertainty — not a reminder that pretends the plan is known.
Jobs — simplicity
Three gestures, in a hospital yard with hot sun and 15% battery:
1. Open the PWA (or the icon they saved). 2. Photograph the paper. 3. Share the radar image into the existing family WhatsApp.
No “invite siblings by email.” No card form. Overseas family get a view link that does not ask them to pay Hearthline to see the tablets.
Csikszentmihalyi — flow
The person *on the island* is already overloaded. Radar shows only the next four hours plus one “do not miss.” When the house is stable, it goes quiet (Harbor). Overseas relatives do not get to ping every thirty minutes — that is how WhatsApp care becomes a second job.
Lennon — radical possibility
The care recipient’s *own* ways (how they like morning tea, which grandchild’s voice settles them, which hospital they refuse) become a household constitution the family can show a future clinician — a continuity of self, not a medical NFT.
Solution overview
Hearthline is a progressive web app for a Jamaican household and its overseas circle. The household on the island is the controller. The diaspora may *look* and *send money through the channels they already trust* (remittance company, bank, Lynk to a *named family member*). Hearthline never intermediate that money.
MAIN launch feature — Care Radar
1. Photograph discharge paper, script, NHF item, or bottle. 2. Extract intervals (dose, window, red flags, follow-up). Person on island confirms or corrects. 3. Polar four-hour radar. Opacity = confidence. Colour = blast radius. 4. Tap “I have this.” Share a still of the radar to WhatsApp. 5. New photo rewrites the field.
Unique interface
A Care Radar — not a US to-do list. Uncertainty is visible. Quiet is a feature.
Cross-device / PWA (Jamaica)
- Install from the browser (“Add to Home Screen”) on Android first; iOS Safari second.
- Offline: last radar + last three photos remain after data dies.
- Low-data mode: one compressed image upload, not a video dump.
- Works at 360px (small Android) and on a desktop for the auntie in the UK.
- Manifest, standalone display, +1 876 support number in the footer of every screen.
Target personas
Primary — Marcia, 44, Portmore, lead daughter
Works in BPO. Mother discharged from Spanish Town Hospital with a handwritten med rec. Brother in Atlanta keeps asking for photos. Marcia will not put a card on a new website. She will photograph the paper if the radar lands in the WhatsApp they already have.
Secondary — Delroy, 68, spouse-caregiver, Mandeville
Smartphone for Lynk and WhatsApp. Large type. Voice confirm. Does not create accounts for fun.
Diaspora viewer — Keisha, 39, Bronx
Sends money monthly. Needs to *see* the plan, not to “subscribe to unlock.” If she ever pays Hearthline, it is a voluntary Circle from *her* US card so Marcia never has to.
Anti-persona
A “care marketplace” operator who wants us to hold helper deposits. That is how this product becomes a scam in the public’s mouth.
Positioning
For the Jamaican household holding the clinic paper — and the family abroad who love them — Hearthline turns that paper into the next four hours. Unlike a WhatsApp pile or a foreign caregiver app, it never takes the remittance and never asks for a hospital password.
Trust & anti-scam (product, not a footer)
- Free radar forever for the island household.
- No helper marketplace in v1.
- Red-flag card: “Hearthline will never ask you to Lynk a deposit to a personal name to ‘activate Mummy’s file.’”
- Registered Jamaican company; walk-in desk at a partner credit union or pharmacy in Kingston and Montego Bay by day 90.
Scores
| Feasibility | Market impact | User appeal |
|---|---|---|
| 8 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 9 / 10 |
Feasibility is high because the MVP is camera + PWA + WhatsApp, not an EHR contract. Impact is the diaspora–island care split. Appeal is “don’t ask me for my card.” The remaining risk is messy public-hospital paper — correction UX must be faster than typing.