Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective August 26, 2026 · Last updated August 26, 2026

The short version

  • Accounts are invite only. There is no public sign-up. You can only create an account with an invitation code issued by the study team.
  • We keep conversations. Calls, texts and chats with REMI are transcribed and stored, and calls are audio-recorded when recording consent has been given.
  • We never sell it — no advertising, no data brokers, no marketing lists. We do use conversations to train and improve AI models; see training.
  • You can opt out at any time, for any reason, without explanation — REMI stops calling and texting, and we stop processing new information.
  • Accounts are not deleted on request. Because REMI is a research study, we keep account and study records after you opt out. See retention.

1. Who we are

REMI is a conversational companion for people living with dementia, developed within the CALM-D initiative at the Emory Center for Data Science, Emory University. This policy covers the REMI promotional site (remistory.com), the caregiver dashboard (dashboard.remistory.com), and the phone calls, text messages and chats REMI has with enrolled participants.

REMI is a research project, not a product, and not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or advise, and it is not an emergency service. Questions about this policy go to darren.liu@emory.edu.

In this policy, caregiver means the person who holds the account — a family member, friend or professional caregiver. Participant means the person living with dementia who talks with REMI.

2. Accounts are invite only

REMI has no open registration. An account can only be created by redeeming an invitation code issued by the study team, and each code has a limited number of uses and can expire or be revoked. When you redeem a code, we record which code you used and link it to your account, so we always know how each account entered the study.

Participants are never self-enrolled. A caregiver adds a participant and confirms, during onboarding, that consent to take part — including consent to call recording — has been obtained. We record who confirmed that consent and when.

3. What we collect

Caregiver account information

Your name, email address, a securely hashed password, an optional phone number, the invitation code you redeemed, your notification preferences, and the time of your last sign-in.

Participant profile

Information a caregiver enters so REMI can hold a good conversation. This is sensitive by nature and includes:

  • Name and preferred name, sex, birthday, marital status and partner's name
  • Phone number, so REMI can reach them
  • Occupation, hobbies, cultural background, personality notes
  • Family and friends — names, relationships and notes about them
  • Dementia stage, cognitive notes and any medical flags the caregiver chooses to record
  • Topics to steer toward, topics to avoid, and conversation pace

Life stories and verified memories

Stories a caregiver writes down, plus short memory passages REMI drafts from conversations. Drafted passages sit in a pending state and are only used in future conversations after a caregiver reviews and approves them. To make retrieval work, passages are also stored as numeric embeddings in a vector database on our own server.

Conversations

  • Transcripts. The full text of every voice call, text thread and web chat, turn by turn, with timestamps.
  • Audio recordings. When recording consent has been given, the whole voice call is recorded. Recordings are stored with our telephony provider and referenced from our database.
  • Derived notes. A summary of each session, key facts, topics discussed, session length, how the call ended, and per-turn emotion labels REMI assigns to help it respond gently.

Technical and security records

An audit log of significant actions in the dashboard — who did what, when, from which IP address and browser — plus ordinary server and web-server logs. We use a short-lived access token and an HTTP-only refresh cookie to keep you signed in; we do not use advertising or analytics cookies.

This promotional website

The pages on remistory.com set no cookies and run no analytics or tracking scripts. They do load web fonts from Google Fonts, which means your IP address and browser details are visible to Google when a page loads. Our web server also records ordinary access logs.

4. How we use information

  • To hold the conversation. The participant's profile, approved memories and recent history are what let REMI talk about their actual life instead of making small talk.
  • To remember between calls. Each session updates a rolling summary so the next call continues the last one.
  • To show caregivers what happened. Transcripts, summaries and session history in the dashboard.
  • To keep conversations safe. Honoring topics to avoid, and ending a call gently when REMI detects distress.
  • To run the research. Analysis of how REMI is used and how well it works, under the oversight that applies to the study at Emory.
  • To train and improve AI models. Conversations are used to make the models behind REMI better — see section 5.
  • To secure the system. Rate limiting, abuse prevention, debugging, and the audit trail.
  • To reach you. Occasional email about your account, the study, or a change to this policy.

We do not sell or rent information, share it with data brokers, or use it for advertising or marketing.

5. Using conversations to train AI models

We may use the information described above — including conversation transcripts, call recordings, participant profiles and life stories — to train, fine-tune and evaluate AI models. That work is part of how REMI is built: the point of the study is to learn what makes a conversational companion genuinely useful to someone living with dementia, and the conversations themselves are what teach us that.

In practice this can mean:

  • Training or fine-tuning models used by REMI, so it converses better, remembers more usefully, and handles difficult moments more gently.
  • Building evaluation sets — real conversations kept as benchmarks to test whether a change makes REMI better or worse.
  • Developing related models within the CALM-D research program at Emory, such as models that summarize a conversation or detect distress.

We keep this inside the study and the research collaborations it runs through. We do not release conversations publicly, and we do not hand them to unrelated companies to train unrelated products.

What this means in practice

Training is not reversible the way a database row is. Once a conversation has contributed to a trained model or an evaluation set, opting out later stops further collection and further use — but it cannot pull that contribution back out of a model that has already been trained.

This is the same reasoning as our position on deletion, and it is the main thing to weigh before enrolling. If you are not comfortable with conversations being used this way, do not enroll.

If a participant's conversations turn out to be unusually sensitive and you want them held out of training while remaining available to you in the dashboard, write to us and we will tell you honestly whether we can accommodate it before any further training run.

6. Who information is shared with

We share only what a service needs to do its job, and only with these categories:

Other caregivers on the same participant
If you invite a sibling, spouse or professional caregiver to a participant, they see that participant's profile, stories, memories, transcripts and recordings. Caregivers can only ever see participants they are linked to — that limit is enforced in the data layer, not just hidden in the interface.
Telephony provider (Twilio)
Places and receives calls and text messages. It handles phone numbers, call audio and message contents, and stores the call recordings.
AI model providers (OpenAI; Anthropic where configured)
Generate REMI's responses, summaries and memory passages, and create the embeddings used for retrieval. Conversation text and the relevant profile and memory context are sent to them over their business APIs. REMI can also run a web search through the model provider when a conversation calls for looking something up.
Speech provider (ElevenLabs)
Converts REMI's replies into the voice you hear. It receives the text REMI is about to say.
Hosting (Amazon Web Services)
Our servers and databases run on AWS infrastructure in the United States.
The Emory study team
Researchers and clinicians working on CALM-D, and staff responsible for research oversight and compliance.
When the law requires it
We may disclose information if compelled by law, or where necessary to protect someone's safety.

7. The participant's own control during a call

REMI identifies itself as an AI companion at the start of a call, and when recording is on, it says so out loud before the conversation begins. A participant can hang up at any time, ignore the call, or reply STOP to a text message to stop further messages. A call is never a requirement, and nothing about REMI's design pressures someone to stay on the line.

8. Your choices

  • Pause or archive a participant. REMI stops calling and texting immediately. Nothing new is collected.
  • Decline recording. Without recording consent, REMI will not place or accept the call at all — recording is a condition of the pilot, so declining means declining participation.
  • Edit or remove content. You can correct any part of a profile, and delete individual life stories or memory passages, from the dashboard.
  • Exclude a memory instead of deleting it. If something is true but distressing, mark it sensitive and REMI will never retrieve it, while the record stays available for your own reference.
  • Remove a participant record. A caregiver can delete a participant, which removes their profile, stories, memories and session records from the dashboard.
  • Change notification preferences, or ask us to stop contacting you about the study.
  • Opt out entirely. Email darren.liu@emory.edu, or use the dashboard. You do not need to give a reason, and opting out has no consequence for any care the participant receives.

Opting out is the complete and permanent end of REMI's contact with a participant: no more calls, no more messages, no new transcripts, no new memories, and nothing new fed into model training. What was already collected is covered by retention below.

9. Retention — and why we do not delete accounts

Please read this before you enroll

We do not delete accounts or study records on request. You can stop using REMI at any moment, but we cannot honor a request to erase your account, a participant's study record, or the transcripts and recordings already collected.

If that is not acceptable to you, the right decision is not to enroll — and if you have already enrolled, to opt out, which stops everything going forward.

The reason is that REMI is a research study rather than a consumer service. The conversations already collected are the study's data. Removing records after the fact would break the integrity of the research and conflict with the record-keeping and audit obligations that apply to research conducted at Emory University. Audit logs, consent records and invitation records exist precisely so that the history of the study cannot be quietly rewritten — including by us.

In practice this means: information is retained for the duration of the study and for as long afterward as Emory's research records policies require, whether or not the account is still in use. Call recordings held by our telephony provider are retained on the same basis. Deleting a participant or a memory in the dashboard removes it from REMI's working knowledge and from what the dashboard shows, but audit records of the actions taken, and any copies already held by a provider or included in study data, may remain.

We are not offering a right to erasure here, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it. If you are subject to a privacy law that grants you such a right and you believe it applies to you, write to us and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot do.

10. How we protect information

  • Traffic to the site and the dashboard is encrypted in transit with TLS.
  • Passwords are stored only as strong one-way hashes, never in readable form.
  • Sessions use short-lived access tokens plus a rotating, HTTP-only refresh cookie, so a stolen token has a narrow window of use.
  • Every read of participant data is scoped in the data layer to the caregivers linked to that participant.
  • Sensitive actions are written to an audit log with actor, time, IP and user agent.
  • Access to the servers and databases is limited to the technical staff who operate them.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you and follow the reporting obligations that apply to the study.

11. Children

REMI is intended for adults. We do not knowingly create accounts for, or enroll, anyone under 18. If you believe a minor's information has reached us, please write to us.

12. Changes to this policy

We will update this page when the study or the system changes, and revise the effective date at the top. For a change that materially affects what we collect or how we use it, we will notify account holders by email. Continuing to use REMI after a change means the updated policy applies.

13. Contact

REMI AI · CALM-D · Emory Center for Data Science, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Email darren.liu@emory.edu — for questions about this policy, to opt out, or to ask what information we hold about a participant.