Listening Comes Before Building: Our Feasibility Study is Live!

I’m building rescAIle in public; it's pretty daunting because I tend to think I know what I am doing, most of the time, but this feels more like flying blind at high speed in the dark. That's why I am running a feasibility study to get your feedback.

Before I design features, write code, or start making promises that sound great on LinkedIn but fall apart in real life, I want to understand something properly: where does mental load actually hurt the most, and where could AI genuinely help rather than just add another thing to manage.

Mental load isn’t just about chores or admin. It’s the remembering, the anticipating, the quiet planning ahead; the emotional glue that keeps life running without anyone quite noticing. It’s knowing there’s a dentist appointment next Thursday while answering emails; remembering that a school trip needs a packed lunch while mentally rewriting a meeting agenda; keeping half a dozen invisible tabs open at all times. If that sounds familiar, you’re very much not alone.

Research tells us that women still carry most of this invisible work. It costs time every week, it drains attention, and it quietly eats into rest, wellbeing, and headspace. Not in dramatic, headline-grabbing ways, but in the slow, cumulative way that leaves you feeling oddly tired even on days when nothing “big” happened.

So why a feasibility study, and not a shiny product launch?

Because it would be very easy to build another productivity app and call it innovation. It would be easy to promise efficiency, optimisation, or a better to-do list. But rescAIle isn’t about doing more; it’s about holding less in your head. And before I decide what AI should take on, I need to understand which moments really matter, where relief would actually be felt, and where technology needs to tread carefully.

This study is designed to answer a few essential questions: which everyday moments create the strongest sense of mental breathing space; what people would trust AI to handle without asking; where the red lines are, and why they exist. I’m not testing whether people should delegate better or communicate more clearly. I’m testing whether technology can help now, in the world as it is, not the world we wish we lived in.

Which brings me to why your voice matters so much.

This research shapes everything. It determines what gets built first, what never gets built at all, and whether rescAIle feels supportive or subtly stressful to use. Getting the emotional tone right, it turns out, matters just as much as the technical capability. Many of the women I’ve spoken to care less about AI “holding” their mental load than about feeling understood while it does so. That insight alone has already changed the direction of the product.

The feasibility study itself is intentionally simple:

• it takes about seven minutes;

• it’s anonymous;

• and it focuses on real life, not idealised scenarios.

  
  

Your responses don’t disappear into a spreadsheet never to be seen again. They directly influence the design decisions I make next.

If you carry mental load, whether for family, work, care, or some messy combination of all three, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. This is how rescAIle stays grounded, humane, and useful; not just another app that means well but misses the point.

You can take part in the feasibility study here.

Thank you for helping shape something that’s meant to care back.