Lumi replaces the home screen on any Android phone with big tiles, clear words, and automatic scam screening. Your parent keeps their phone and their number. You get a dashboard that tells you they're okay.
Works on the phone they have now. No new device. No contract.
The problem
Smartphones were not designed for people who did not grow up with them. Three things happen in almost every family we talked to.
One in three seniors say their phone is too complicated to use. So they stop using most of it, and stay on a device that frustrates them every day.
Families spend hours every week walking a parent through the same steps. The same call, the same question, every week.
Older adults reported losing billions of dollars a year to fraud, and most simplified phone screens offer nothing at all to help. FTC
How it works
Setup takes about five minutes and it happens once. You can do it during a normal visit.
Download Lumi onto the Android phone they already use and set it as the home screen. Nothing is deleted. Their number, photos, and contacts all stay exactly where they are.
Lumi shows a pairing code. You enter it once on your own device to connect. From then on you can see how they're doing from wherever you are, without having to call and ask.
They get a phone that makes sense. You get told when a scam is blocked, when a dose is missed, and if they ever press SOS. When nothing is wrong, you hear nothing.
What's inside
Can a 75 year old look at this screen and know exactly what to do? Every tile, every word, and every button size had to pass that test before it shipped.
No app drawer to dig through and no folders to get lost in. Eight large tiles with real words under them, a greeting by name, and the time and battery in type big enough to read across a room.
No contact list to scroll and no dial pad to get lost in. The people they call most sit at the top as large cards with a name and a green call button big enough to hit every time.
The day laid out by morning, afternoon and evening, with a big "Take now" button on each one. Tapping it marks the dose taken, and the family sees that on their dashboard within seconds.
Four simple games that come with Lumi and need no setup, no account, and no in-app purchases. Anything already on the phone shows up here too.
A normal notification disappears in seconds, in type most seniors cannot read in time. Lumi keeps every one of them, large enough to read, so a message noticed an hour later is still there.
Not everyone wants every app. Any tile can be switched off and the order changed, with plain on and off switches and simple up and down buttons. No dragging, no long presses, nothing to discover.
Incoming calls and texts are checked automatically. Nobody has to remember to turn anything on, and nobody has to decide in the moment whether a message is real.
A red SOS bar sits at the bottom of every screen. Holding it alerts the family with their location and calls 911. Always the same place, so there is nothing to find.
Clear reminders at the right time each day. If a dose is missed, the reminder escalates and the family gets told, so nobody is relying on memory alone.
Ask Lumi to make a call, check the weather, or set a reminder. It answers in ordinary language instead of reading out a menu of options.
For the family
Install Lumi on your own phone, enter a 6-digit code once, and you get a live dashboard for your parent's phone. This is the part families tell us matters most, and it is the reason the weekly "is everything okay?" phone call stops being necessary.
The first screen answers the question you actually have. Did they take their medication, where are they, is the phone charged, and has anything gone wrong today.
Everything updates live. When nothing is wrong, there is nothing to check.
Add it here and it appears on their phone. They don't have to do anything.
Medications stay on their phone, marked off by the person actually taking them.
Setting it up
You do this once. After that both phones stay connected on their own.
Install Lumi on your parent's Android phone and set it as the home screen. During setup it shows a 6-digit pairing code. You can find it again any time under Settings, then Caregiver settings.
Get the same app on your own Android phone. Open Settings, then Caregiver settings, and choose "I'm a Caregiver".
Type in the 6 digits from their phone. Their dashboard opens on yours straight away, and stays connected until you unlink it.
The two apps
Install both and they behave like one product. They are separate for a reason worth knowing about, explained just below.
App one
The home screen itself, plus everything that is not calling and texting. This is the app that changes what your parent sees when they pick up the phone.
App two
The calling and texting app. You set it as the phone's main app for calls and texts, which is what allows it to check messages for scams before your parent ever sees them.
To check a text message for a scam, an app has to be the phone's main texting app. Android only grants that to an app whose actual job is calling and texting. Keeping that in its own app means the scam screening can do its work, and it keeps the rest of Lumi simple. You install both once and then never think about it again.
Who built this
"My mom was spending hours teaching her dad how to use his phone. I kept thinking there had to be something better than her explaining the same thing again every week."
Bowman Courtney
Founder, Lumi
In person interviews. Before writing any code, we sat down with seniors at communities around Oklahoma and asked what actually gets in their way. Every screen in Lumi traces back to something a real person said.
Pitch competition winner. Lumi placed in the top six and won $2,000 at the Francis Tuttle Entrepreneurship Pitch Competition in May 2026.
A real company. Lumi is built by Lumi LLC, an Oklahoma company. Your data is never sold. Messages are checked for scams and are not stored or shared with anyone outside your family.
Reviews
Lumi is in beta with families in Oklahoma. We are collecting reviews from real users rather than writing our own, so this space stays empty until theirs are in. If you would like to be one of the first, we would genuinely like to hear from you.
Join the betaNot only for seniors
Large type and high contrast are the default, not a setting buried three menus deep that someone else has to switch on.
Big targets and a layout that never rearranges itself make the phone predictable when fine motor control is harder.
The same buttons stay in the same places every time. Reminders arrive on their own instead of relying on someone to remember.
Some people just want a phone that calls, texts, and checks the weather without forty other things competing for attention.
Questions
No. That is the whole point of Lumi. It installs on the Android phone your parent already owns and takes over the home screen. They keep their number, their contacts, their photos, and their carrier.
To check a text message for a scam, an app has to be the phone's main texting app, and Android only grants that to an app whose job is calling and texting. So the calling and texting side lives in its own app. You install both once during setup and then they work as one.
Not yet. Apple does not allow apps to replace the home screen on iPhone, so Lumi is Android only. If your parent has an iPhone, an inexpensive Android phone is currently the only way to use Lumi.
Yes. Everything already installed still works and can still be opened. Lumi changes what they see first, so the things they use most are the easiest to reach.
A red SOS bar sits at the bottom of every screen. Holding it sends an alert with their location to the family members you set up, then places a call to 911. If it was pressed by mistake, a cancellation message goes out automatically. Lumi is not a replacement for calling 911 directly and does not guarantee emergency service reliability.
Easy Mode makes icons bigger. It does not check for scams, it does not tell family anything, it has no medication reminders, and there is no emergency button. Lumi is built around the family relationship, not just the font size.
The install has to happen once on their phone, so someone needs to be with them for about five minutes. After that, everything else is managed remotely from your own device using the pairing code.
Lumi never sells your data. Messages are checked for scams and are not stored or shared with anyone outside your family. The full details are in our privacy policy, linked at the bottom of this page.
Get started
Install it on the phone they already have. Five minutes, once, and then the weekly tech support calls stop.
See the setup steps first if you want to know what is involved.
Use the email you sign in with on your Android phone, that is the one we add to the test.
Would rather write to a person? Email us instead.
Coming soon to Google Play
How the beta works
Testers keep Lumi free for life.
Works on the phone they own · No new device · Cancel anytime