The story behind the product
Strokecovery did not begin in a lab or a startup accelerator. It began in a hospital waiting room on March 13, 2022 — and the four years that followed are the reason we are building speech practice first, and nothing else yet.
What shaped this app
Started
March 13, 2022
Throughline
Six weeks before she said a single word. That is what we are building for.
Years lived
4+
Building
One thing
My mother was 56 and in good health. There was no warning — just an ordinary day that became extraordinary in the worst way. She had a hemorrhagic stroke: a 50 mL brain bleed with a 1.7 cm midline shift. We reached the emergency room within thirty minutes. The neurosurgeon did not waste time. She needed an emergency decompressive craniectomy just to survive the night.
I was 31. Before that day, I genuinely did not know that a stroke was a brain event. I had always assumed it had something to do with the heart. That ignorance ended the moment we walked into the ICU, and it has never returned.
In the weeks that followed, she underwent a tracheostomy, and later a cranioplasty. Three major surgeries. The bleed had damaged her right Broca's area — the part of the brain responsible for producing speech. She had to relearn language from the beginning.
It was six weeks before she uttered a single word. Six weeks of watching someone who had so much to say — someone who had a whole life of words inside her — struggle to get even one of them out.
What no one tells you about aphasia is that the words are often there. She could see them in her mind. She knew what she wanted to say. But the bridge between thought and speech had been damaged, and every word had to be rebuilt from scratch — sound by sound, syllable by syllable.
She had to relearn everything. Including my name. The name she had given me.
The doctors had told us she would likely be wheelchair-bound for life. Six months later, she was walking — with support, but walking. It was the result of extraordinary effort: hers first, and the family's around her. We never stopped, and neither did she.
I am a PhD researcher by training. When something is important to me, I read. So I read — more than 50 peer-reviewed research papers, more than 10 books on stroke and neuroplasticity. My YouTube recommendations were entirely overtaken by stroke recovery channels within the first month. I found caregiver support groups. I turned to philosophy to understand how to hold together under sustained uncertainty.
My entire world reorganized itself around my mother's recovery. Work schedules shifted. Vacations were missed. Extended working from home became the norm so I could be close. Old hobbies faded quietly. New ones appeared — ones that could be done in the gaps between therapy appointments, hospital visits, and the long evenings of not knowing what tomorrow would bring.
Caregiving does not just ask for your time. It asks for your identity. And slowly, if you let it, it gives you a better one back.
This journey changed me in ways I am still discovering. The hours spent planning, researching, and caring have reshaped what I value and where I am going. The trajectory of my life changed — and on reflection, it changed for good.
4
Years of recovery journey
50+
Research papers read
9
Therapy programs across 3 disciplines
10+
Books on stroke and neuroplasticity
Every one of these came out of four years of actually doing this — not from a workshop or a competitor analysis. They are all real, and they all still matter.
I tried to build all of them at once. That version reached fifty screens and never became something a single person could use, because nothing was ever finished enough to put in front of anyone. So this time I am building one. The first one below. The other four are here because they are true, not because they are coming soon.
Speech Practice
Building this nowTherapists have limited time. The hour ends and the recovery does not.
We ended up stitching together four or five small apps to keep practice going between sessions. None of them were built for someone with aphasia, and not one of them worked in Tamil — the language my mother actually thinks in. Practising word finding in a language you do not think in is not really practice. That gap is the whole reason this app exists, and it is the only thing we are building until it works.
Real, and not being built yet
Medication Log
For months, we took the tablets out of the strips and handed them to her one by one.
She swallowed without knowing what she was taking. Eventually we wrote the names on a card and placed it in her medicine box so she could begin to do it herself. A missed dose is a serious thing, so if we ever build this it has to be built properly — which is exactly why it is not next.
Therapy Calendar & History
"What did she do last Thursday?" We could never answer that question.
Short-term memory was overloaded. Details faded. In April, we couldn't tell you how many physical therapy sessions she had in January versus February. That invisible history deserves a home. It does not have one here yet.
Symptom & Pain Journal
I kept a handwritten pain log for over a year — every ailment she mentioned, no matter how small.
A minor neck strain. A spasticity flare. A bad night. I wrote it all down because I knew any detail could matter later. That notebook is still a notebook.
Doctor Visit Prep
Follow-up appointments are short. The waiting room is long. And the things you meant to discuss get forgotten.
We walked out of more than one appointment wishing we had asked something. The right information, ready when it matters, would change that — one day.
Improvement cannot be measured overnight.
But patience and practice,
with a positive mindset,
will carry you a long way.
Four years taught us this. It is the reason we would rather ship one honest thing than promise ten.
Gireesh Sundaram
Caregiver & Creator, Strokecovery
If you are a survivor fighting to reclaim your words, or a caregiver giving everything you have for someone you love — I am building this for you, and I know exactly where you are standing. It is not finished. Tell me what it needs.
I am extremely responsive on Twitter — feel free to reach out.