If you care for someone with dementia, you live with a specific fear that rarely gets spoken aloud. It follows you through the grocery runs you do for your mother, the medication reminders, the phone calls where you ask “did you eat today?” and wait for the answer with your whole chest. The fear is not vague. It is concrete and specific: the kitchen, unattended, a burner still going, a pan forgotten. The fear that something will happen on a Tuesday afternoon when you are thirty minutes away and your phone is in your bag.
Aviana Machnes, a 14-year-old ninth-grader from Montreal, knows that fear from the inside. Her grandmother has early-onset dementia, and one day Aviana learned that a pot had been left on the stove and walked away from. Nobody was hurt. But the gap between what could have happened and what did was not the kind of gap a fourteen-year-old with a soldering iron was willing to accept.
She built something instead.
The Device That Started as a Science Fair Project
Using current sensors and motion detectors, Machnes created a device she called the Forget-Me-Not, which automatically triggers an alarm if no one is in the vicinity of a stove for an extended period of time. The concept is elegant in the way the best ideas always are in hindsight: not surveillance, not a lockout, but a presence detector trained on a specific window of danger. The stove is on. Nobody is standing near it. Nothing has gone wrong yet. The device notices.
The Montreal teen was recognized for taking a frightening moment at home and responding with engineering. Her project earned top placement at her regional science fair, and she has spoken publicly about her hope to patent the Forget-Me-Not for use in long-term care homes. That is either the ambition of a kid who has not yet learned to think small, or the clarity of someone who has already understood exactly what is at stake. It is probably both.
The Problem the Forget-Me-Not Is Trying to Solve
According to the WHO, in 2021, 57 million people had dementia worldwide, with nearly 10 million new cases diagnosed every year. Behind each of those cases is a family rearranging itself around someone they love who is losing pieces of themselves gradually, not all at once, which is in many ways harder to manage than a sudden crisis. You can plan for a crisis. You cannot always plan for “she seems fine today.”
A 2025 peer-reviewed review of fire risk and dementia found that as the condition progresses, people become more susceptible to cooking accidents that can lead to fire – a concern raised consistently by people living with dementia, family carers, and healthcare professionals alike. The kitchen is a particular pressure point because it is also a place of autonomy and habit. People who have cooked their whole lives do not simply stop wanting to cook. The muscle memory runs deep, even when the short-term recall does not.
The same review found that dementia disrupts not just memory but reasoning and executive function, which means a person may remember exactly how to turn on a burner and have no reliable response once something goes wrong. That combination – the preserved habit alongside the impaired judgment – is where the danger lives. Standard workarounds like knob covers and reminder notes on the refrigerator assume the person will notice them. Dementia is precisely the condition that makes that assumption unreliable.
What Makes the Forget-Me-Not Different
Most existing stove safety technology works through restriction. Knob covers prevent the stove from being turned on. Timers cut the power after a set number of minutes. Some smart motion-sensor devices automatically shut the stove off after fifteen minutes of no activity nearby. These are useful, particularly in mid-to-late stage dementia. But they also remove agency entirely, which creates its own problems. A person who cannot understand why the knobs will not turn tends to feel confused, then frustrated, then, often, diminished.
The Forget-Me-Not works differently: it triggers a warning rather than shutting anything down. The stove stays accessible. The person keeps their autonomy. What changes is that an alert fires before an accident can develop. There is a real difference between keeping someone safe and making them feel watched, managed, and incapable. The best caregiving technology holds both of those things at once, and the Forget-Me-Not, designed by a teenager who watched her grandmother and thought “I can fix this,” appears to do exactly that.
The peer-reviewed literature makes clear that assistive technologies for people with dementia need to be introduced at the right time, while the person is still capable of engaging with the stove. Stove shut-off devices introduced too late were described in one study as “an odd artefact that obstructed cooking” – they stopped people from using the stove at all because the changed appearance was disorienting. An alarm-based system sidesteps that problem. Nothing looks different. Nothing has been removed. The checkpoint is invisible until it is needed.
The Weight a Teenager Carried Into a Science Fair
It is easy to read a story like this as a feel-good moment: a bright kid, a winning project, a good headline. It is also something more uncomfortable than that. To build this device, Aviana had to sit with the fear of what had happened and translate it into a problem statement, then into a circuit, then into a presentation she could defend in front of judges. That is not nothing. That is a teenager processing grief and fear through the only tool she had available, which happened to be ingenuity.
For every Aviana, there are hundreds of thousands of families for whom the same fear does not produce an invention. It just produces more vigilance, more midnight check-ins, calls to neighbors, and the exhausting arithmetic of trying to be in two places at once. If you are one of those families, you already know the weight of this.
The WHO reports that dementia is currently the seventh leading cause of death globally, and that in 2019 it cost economies worldwide 1.3 trillion US dollars, with approximately 50 percent of those costs attributable to informal caregivers who provide on average five hours of care and supervision per day. Five hours a day. That number belongs in the same sentence as “and most of them have other jobs, and other children, and other people depending on them.” Women provide 70 percent of those care hours, and the system runs on that fact without making much room to acknowledge it.
What the Research Says About What Families Actually Need
The literature on assistive technology for dementia is candid about its limitations: devices that restrict access can sometimes cause additional confusion and risk, particularly when introduced after the disease has already progressed significantly. An alarm-based system represents a different category of thinking entirely – one that preserves function while adding a safety net.
According to FEMA, a working smoke alarm in the home can reduce the risk of dying in a fire by up to 60 percent. Basic interventions have a measurable impact. The problem is that they still require someone to respond. A smoke alarm that goes off at 3 a.m. when no one is in earshot has failed at its purpose. What Aviana built is a system that acts before the alarm needs to sound, in the gap between “unattended stove” and “fire,” which is exactly where caregivers have always needed something to exist.
And the data on who is most at risk makes the need concrete. The National Fire Protection Association, as reported by helpdementia.com, found that 58 percent of those who died in cooking fires were aged 55 or older. Unattended cooking is the leading factor in cooking fire casualties. The Forget-Me-Not addresses that precise scenario: the moment the stove is on and nobody is there.
Read More: Study Finds, Having Sons is Associated with Accelerated Brain Aging
What We Should Be Doing With This Story
A ninth-grader, fourteen years old, was afraid for her grandmother and responded by becoming an engineer. Not because she had resources others do not have. Not because she was extraordinary in ways most people could not access. Because the problem was personal, and personal problems have a way of producing solutions when someone is motivated enough to find them.
Science fairs have long been the starting point for inventions that later found real-world applications. These projects often begin with a problem at home or in the community that becomes the catalyst for experimentation, and with guidance from teachers and access to basic tools, students can transform an idea into something tangible. Aviana’s story belongs in that lineage. And if she manages to patent the Forget-Me-Not and get it into long-term care homes, it will have started from a pot left on the stove and a granddaughter who refused to file that moment away under “we got lucky.”
What This Story Holds
The Forget-Me-Not is a real device. Aviana Machnes is a real person. The grandmother at the center of this is a real woman who deserves both her autonomy and her safety. But the story is also a mirror for every family navigating this right now, trying to hold someone they love close enough to keep them safe without holding so tight that they take away the last things that feel like hers.
There is no device that resolves the grief of watching someone you love lose their footing in the world they used to know. The pot left on the stove is not just a fire hazard. It is a marker, a moment you look back on later and think: that was when things started to change. Aviana saw that moment and built something to prevent it from becoming something worse. That is not the same as fixing the underlying loss. But it is real and it is useful, and it exists now because a fourteen-year-old from Montreal loved her grandmother and had access to a soldering iron.
Whatever form your own caregiving looks like right now, whether you are three months into a new diagnosis or three years in, or standing at the very beginning wondering whether the forgetfulness is something to worry about, there are resources that exist alongside the fear. You do not have to have it figured out.
The archive of what we carry as caregivers does not get smaller. It only grows. The best we can do, most days, is find the people and the tools that make it more bearable.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.