Recallify at the National Head Injury Conference 2025: Using AI to Support Everyday Life After Brain Injury
Our co founder Dr Sarah Rudebeck recently presented Recallify at the National Head Injury Conference 2025, sharing the story behind the app and how people living with acquired brain injury are using it in their daily lives. The talk covered everything from the clinical experiences that inspired Recallify, to real user feedback, to what comes next in our research journey.
You can watch the full presentation below.
The moment that started it all
Sarah has worked as a paediatric neuropsychologist for over a decade, supporting young people recovering from stroke, traumatic brain injury, and chronic epilepsy. Throughout her career, she has heard countless stories about how cognitive change affects everyday life: young people who feel different from their peers, families struggling with memory books that fall apart mid appointment, and students left without adequate support in the classroom.
But it was two young patients in particular who changed everything.
Both had experienced severe memory difficulties for different reasons. They were, in Sarah’s words, “densely amnesic” and unable to hold onto new memories beyond about 20 minutes. Yet intellectually, they were capable and motivated to move forward with their lives.
One of them said something that stuck: “I wish I could live my life over and over again just so I could remember it.” She had discovered that if she watched a programme seven times, she could eventually remember it. Sarah’s immediate thought was that modern technology, and specifically AI, should be able to give people like her access to their own memories without needing to repeat everything seven times.
That conversation, combined with years of clinical experience and the emerging capabilities of artificial intelligence, became the starting point for Recallify.
Fitting into a bigger picture
Sarah’s presentation also highlighted the draft NICE guidelines for people living with chronic neurological conditions, which call on clinicians and researchers to develop and adopt new technologies that support day to day living. This is an important distinction that Sarah was keen to make: Recallify is not about trying to improve memory ability itself. Instead, it is about giving people back autonomy and helping them participate more fully in daily life.
As Sarah put it during the talk, her PhD focused on memory training, and she knows how challenging that area of research is. Recallify takes a different approach, one that focuses on supporting everyday memory through practical tools rather than attempting to retrain cognitive function.
How people are actually using it
One of the most compelling parts of the presentation was hearing directly from a Recallify user who is living with an acquired brain injury. She is a teacher who has returned to work and uses the app in a range of ways that reflect the real, messy complexity of life after brain injury.
At work, she records long inset training sessions that she cannot fully absorb in one sitting. Rather than relying on patchy handwritten notes, she goes back to the AI generated summaries afterwards to fill in the gaps. She also records classroom observations of trainee teachers she mentors. The summaries help her provide more thorough feedback, and the trainees themselves have responded positively, finding the summaries a useful reflection of what students took from their lessons.
At home, she uses Recallify for parents evenings, recording what teachers say and working through the feedback later with her children. She described one particularly useful example: an information evening about a school residential trip, where a large amount of detail was shared but all she truly needed was what time, where, and what to pack. The app’s summary cut through the noise, and she was able to set reminders for closer to the trip date so she did not have to dig through printed paperwork weeks later.
What came through clearly was the value of having everything in one place, on a device she always has with her. As she explained, she is good at writing notes in a diary, using sticky notes, and putting things in her work calendar. But those systems are scattered. With Recallify on her phone, she knows the information is captured and accessible whenever she needs it.
Feedback from service users
Beyond individual stories, Sarah shared findings from Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) sessions supported by the Brain Injury Healthcare Research Centre at Cambridge. Groups of people living with brain injury tried the app and provided structured feedback.
The standout feature, by a clear margin, was the AI summaries. Users consistently said the summaries helped them cut through unnecessary detail and get to the information that mattered. This echoes what clinicians working in neurorehabilitation often observe: after a brain injury, the problem is not always that information is lost entirely, but that it becomes harder to filter, prioritise, and retrieve what is important.
Interestingly, some users found their own ways of using the app that the team had not anticipated. Several people used Recallify primarily as a reminder tool, recording quick voice notes about things they needed to do in the future and setting reminders straight from the app. This kind of organic, user led adaptation is something Sarah described as one of the unexpected but welcome discoveries of the project so far.
The feedback sessions also surfaced practical issues. Earlier versions of the app required a constant internet connection for recording, which caused problems for some users. The team has since resolved this: if connectivity drops during a recording, the audio is saved locally and uploaded once a connection is restored.
The journey so far
Sarah was refreshingly honest about the realities of developing a health technology product. She admitted that what started as “a simple idea” turned out to be anything but. The team built a minimum viable product and then took it through extensive user testing with Headway Brighton, whose service users gave direct, practical feedback about everything from button placement to confusing screen labels.
That willingness to listen and iterate has been central to Recallify’s development. The app is now available on both the App Store and Google Play, and at the time of the presentation had recently reached 1,000 users.
Sarah also acknowledged a real tension in the field of AI and health technology: the pace of AI development does not wait for traditional regulatory timelines. If a team pauses to go through a full medical device approval process, the technology may be outdated by the time it is cleared. That is part of the reason Recallify has been made freely available, putting the power in users’ hands and actively seeking their feedback to guide development.
The project is supported by advisors including Prof Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (UCL) and Prof Andrew Bateman, and has received investment from Bethnal Green Ventures, a tech for good investor.
What comes next
Sarah outlined several directions for the next phase of Recallify’s development:
The team is broadening the range of neurological populations using the app, with people living with MS and Parkinson’s disease now trying it alongside those with acquired brain injury.
On the compliance and evidence front, the foundational requirements are in place, and the team is working toward NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) compliance. Since this talk, Recallify has also been awarded funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for a 12 month feasibility study evaluating the app for brain injury self management, in partnership with the University of Essex.
There is also a focus on understanding who benefits most from this type of technology. As Sarah noted, users like the teacher featured in the talk have a specific profile: she has returned to work and has particular memory and fatigue challenges that the app addresses well. Identifying these profiles more clearly will help the team understand where Recallify can make the biggest difference, and where other approaches may be more appropriate.
Watch the full talk
If you work in neurorehabilitation, brain injury services, or have a personal interest in how AI can support cognitive challenges in daily life, the full presentation is well worth a watch. Sarah’s clinical perspective, combined with real user feedback, gives an honest and grounded picture of what AI can and cannot do in this space.
Recallify is free to download & trial on iOS and Android. If you try it and have thoughts, the team would genuinely love to hear from you. Get in touch at info@recallify.ai.
iOS App
Get Recallify from the App Store to boost your memory, learning, and task management.
Android App
Get Recallify from Google Play to boost your memory, learning, and task management.
