How to Set Up Keel for a Parent: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide

Keel is designed to be accessible. Your parent needs a smartphone, tablet, or computer with internet access. No app download is required — it works in any modern web browser. And critically: no account is needed to try it. The first 30 days are completely free, with no credit card required.

This low barrier to entry is intentional. You are not asking your parent to commit to anything. You are asking them to try five short tests one morning and see how it feels. Most people find the experience straightforward and even interesting. The tests take about four minutes total.

If your parent is comfortable with their phone but not particularly tech-confident, sit with them for the first session. Walk through it together. Once they have done it once, most people can manage it independently going forward.

The single most important thing you can do to make Keel useful is to help your parent build a consistent daily habit. The value of the data comes almost entirely from repetition. One session tells you very little. Thirty sessions, taken at the same time each morning, begin to build a meaningful personal baseline.

The best time for the daily check-in is first thing in the morning, before the demands of the day interfere. Cognitive performance is relatively consistent in the morning for most people, and doing the tests before coffee, major meals, or significant mental effort reduces confounding factors.

Attach Keel to something your parent already does every morning. With coffee, after breakfast, before the morning walk. A phone alarm labeled 'Keel check-in' at a consistent time is an effective backup cue. Once the habit is established — usually after two to three weeks — the reminder becomes less necessary.

Keel tracks five cognitive domains: memory, attention, processing speed, executive function, and visuospatial function. Each daily session produces a score across these domains. Over time, those scores build a personal trend line — your parent's own baseline.

What matters is not the absolute score on any given day, but the trend over weeks and months. A single bad session means almost nothing on its own — everyone has off days. What is meaningful is whether performance is stable over time, improving, or slowly declining.

Keel is not a diagnostic tool. It does not produce a clinical score that tells you whether something is wrong. What it produces is a longitudinal record of personal performance that you and your parent's doctor can use as context for other observations. Think of it the way you would think of a blood pressure log — useful data, but interpreted by a doctor in context.

Keel's data belongs to the person doing the tracking. This is an important ethical point, and we think it is the right design: cognitive performance data is personal, and your parent has the right to decide who sees it.

If your parent is willing to share their data with you — which many people are, especially if the tracking was partly motivated by family concern — they can do so directly. The most natural approach is simply to look at it together, which also gives you an opportunity to discuss what you see in a collaborative rather than surveillance-like way.

If your parent prefers to keep their data private, respect that. The value of consistent daily tracking exists for them regardless of whether you see the data. And if there is ever a doctor's appointment, they can share the trend data themselves — their own evidence, not your secondhand report.

The free tier gives your parent 30 days of history, which is enough to establish a baseline and see early patterns. Keel Pro ($20 per month or $99 per year) unlocks unlimited history, which is where the long-term value really comes from.

After 30 days of consistent use, a subscription becomes easy to justify: the trend data is now genuinely informative and you want to keep building it. The subscription can be gifted — Keel Pro makes a thoughtful gift for a health-conscious parent who is already engaged with the habit.

You do not need to make this decision upfront. Start with the free tier, let the habit form, and revisit the subscription question after a month.