Truth Mjumbe launches AI-powered tool to preserve memory and dignity
Professional counseling student at Penn GSE Truth Mjumbe built Recall Aid, an AI-powered memory-support platform inspired by his own experience with epilepsy, his grandfather’s dementia, and his father’s work preserving civil rights histories.
2 min. read
Every 3.2 seconds, someone in the world develops dementia. For Truth Mjumbe, a second-year student in Professional Counseling at Penn’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), the statistics are not abstract. He has personally faced memory challenges connected to epilepsy, his grandfather lives with dementia, and he has seen how memory loss disproportionately affects older Black adults. Those realities shaped Recall Aid, an AI-powered memory support tool he began building as an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and continues to refine at Penn GSE.
Truth Mjumbe is a graduate student in Professional Counseling at Penn’s Graduate School of Education.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn GSE)
As an undergraduate at Morehouse, Mjumbe began experimenting with ways technology could help him compensate for memory gaps linked to epilepsy.
“I realized that when someone reminds you of a moment, a flood of detail comes back almost instantly. That’s called cue-dependent memory,” he explains. “I wondered, what if AI could provide that kind of cue? Could we build a tool that helps people recall their own stories in that same natural way?”
Mjumbe tested early versions of Recall Aid on fellow students at Morehouse. After submitting the concept to Microsoft, he received $150,000 in funding to advance the project. Recall Aid does more than prompt recall. It incorporates culturally familiar voices and personalized storytelling, addressing the reality, as shown by research from the National Institute on Aging, that dementia affects Black Americans at nearly twice the rate of white Americans. For Mjumbe, that commitment is both professional and personal.
“My grandfather’s experience with dementia made this urgent,” he says. “But it is also about a larger community need. Too many stories disappear before they are told.”
At Penn GSE, Mjumbe has found a home where his academic interests in therapy and human development intersect with his entrepreneurial drive. A master’s student in the Professional Counselling program, he provides counseling to adults over 55 as part of his fieldwork. That hands-on practice informs his vision for Recall Aid.
Through Catalyst @ Penn GSE’s virtual accelerator, Catapult, he gained structure for developing the app and learned directly from interviews with elders. A mixed methods course helped him design a proposal to bring Recall Aid into eight Philadelphia nursing homes, outlining a timeline, measures, and implementation plan.
“Talking with people in the community gave me insights I could never have gotten on my own,” Djumbe says. “Penn GSE helped me see how to move from an idea to something that could scale responsibly.”
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