Family In The Loop: Enabling Family Involvement in Dementia Care at Long-term Facilities with Person-centered AI Tools

Family involvement is crucial to person-centered dementia care, yet communication breakdowns, fragmented documentation, and resource constraints often hinder meaningful collaboration in long-term care facilities. This paper introduces Family In The Loop (FITL), an AI-enabled platform designed through a year of fieldwork and deployed across multiple facilities to strengthen person-centered care coordination between families and staff. FITL ingests passive data, (video streams and electronic health records), along with active user feedback, integrating these into four interconnected realtime views: Essentials View provides concise AI-generated care recommendations; Reels View offers personalized video highlights to reassure families; Explanations View answers user queries via a natural-language interface with links to supporting evidence; and Archives View ensures accountability by aggregating, indexing, and presenting the underlying care data in a structured historical record. Our contributions are: (1) empirical insights into how communication breakdowns, documentation gaps, and trust barriers undermine person-centered care and family involvement; (2) field-based design principles, developed in response to these challenges and instantiated in FITL, that enhance transparency and emotional reassurance without adding staff burden; (3) deployment findings detailing practical strategies for integrating AI tools into real-world care routines; and (4) a conceptual vision for scalable, data-driven, and role-sensitive person-centered care. These contributions advance CSCW by showing how integrated AI can support person-centered care in complex, resource-limited environments.