The between-rounds problem.
Nurses round on the hour. The resident lives in the gap. Companion makes what happened at 8:47 visible to the nurse who walks in at 10am.
In most skilled nursing facilities, rounds happen on a cadence. Every hour for higher-acuity halls, every two for stable ones, longer overnight. A nurse or aide walks in, checks on the resident, charts, and moves to the next room. The cadence is what the staffing model can sustain, and it is genuinely the work — done well, by people who care.
But a great deal of what shapes a resident's outcome happens between those visits. A pill stays on the tray. Someone swings their legs over the rail at 8:47 and decides to try the bathroom alone. Sleep gets restless three nights before a UTI shows up in labs. Mood shifts in a way the morning nurse would have caught, if the morning nurse had been there.
Charting from memory is the workaround.
Today the gap is closed by recall. The aide remembers what she saw on her last pass and writes it up later. The nurse pieces together a shift from fragments. It works, mostly, because the people doing it are good at their jobs. It also loses things — quiet things, the kind that only matter in retrospect.
Companion lives in the gap.
Companion isn't a replacement for rounds. It's the device that stays in the room when no one else can. It listens for a call, talks back when spoken to, watches for a transfer attempt, and quietly notes the shape of the night. None of that replaces a nurse's eyes — it just means her eyes aren't the only record of what happened.
The product effect is small and specific: the nurse who walks in at 10am already knows what happened at 8:47. The next thing we're shipping is a between-rounds digest at the top of every chart — the three things from the gap that the next person in the room should know before they say hello.