Seven short questions. No score, no diagnosis — just a calm, measured next step. The output is a paragraph, not a verdict.
Most occasional memory lapses are not signs of cognitive decline. The reliable signal is a sustained pattern that persists after you account for sleep, stress, illness, and medication. Sudden, severe, or rapidly progressing changes — or changes that interfere with daily function — should be discussed with a doctor without delay. For everything else, tracking your cognition daily for 4–8 weeks is usually more useful than a single test.
Take memory changes seriously when they are sudden in onset, when they interfere with the basics of daily life (cooking, paying bills, navigating familiar places, recognizing close family), when other people close to you have noticed them independently, or when they are accompanied by personality changes, confusion about time and place, or impaired judgment. In those situations a clinician should be involved, not an app.
Normal forgetting is occasional, recoverable (the word comes back, the name surfaces an hour later), and not interfering with function. Dementia involves progressive change across multiple cognitive domains — memory plus language, plus reasoning, plus judgment — that gets worse over time and impairs daily function. Keel does not diagnose either; it helps you see whether your own performance is stable or trending.
Yes. Acute stress, chronic insomnia, sleep apnea, depression, anxiety, alcohol, and many medications can produce cognitive symptoms that mimic early dementia. This is one reason a single bad day or bad week is rarely diagnostic. A daily baseline that records context (sleep, illness, medication) is much better at distinguishing reversible causes from sustained changes.
Bring data, not just impressions. A daily cognitive baseline for several weeks, plus a written list of specific incidents (with dates, sleep, medications, and other context), gives a clinician something concrete to work with. Doctors generally find structured personal data more useful than 'I feel like I'm forgetting more.'