Charlie met with his co-worker Keith over lunch to plan a professional development day they were supposed to lead over April break, but Charlie kept losing the thread of the discussion. He couldn't stop thinking about who or what was maintaining backups of his old website. Keith sat opposite him with his compartmentalized lunchbox of raw ingredients; Keith only ever described the actions he performed on food as "meal prep," perhaps because cooking involved a willingness to adapt and surprise oneself. Charlie stabbed mindlessly at his corner-store Cobb salad, and by the second time he asked Keith to repeat something he'd just said, Keith's expression sank into sharp suspicion. "Charlie, come on," Keith said, but somewhat to Charlie's relief, Keith wasn't reading Charlie's mind and judging his salacious past.

Left: The display that carers will see in the Milbotix app. Inventor Dr Zeke Steer quit his job and took a PhD at Bristol Robotics Laboratory so he could find a way to help people like his great-grandmother, who became anxious and aggressive because of her dementia. Milbotix's smart socks track heart rate, sweat levels and motion to give insights on the wearer's wellbeing – most importantly how anxious the person is feeling. They look and feel like normal socks, do not need charging, are machine washable and provide a steady stream of data to carers, who can easily see their patient's metrics on an app. Current alternatives to Milbotix's product are worn on wrist straps, which can stigmatise or even cause more stress.

The first voice you hear on the recording is mine. "Here we are," I say. My tone is cheerful, but a catch in my throat betrays how nervous I am. "Esquire," a second voice on the recording chimes in, and this one word--delivered as a winking parody of lawyerly pomposity--immediately puts me more at ease. The speaker is my dad. We are sitting across from each other in my parents' bedroom, him in a rose-colored armchair and me in a desk chair. It's the same room where, decades ago, he calmly forgave me after I confessed that I'd driven the family station wagon through a garage door. Now it's May 2016, he is 80 years old, and I am holding a digital audio recorder. Sensing that I don't quite know how to proceed, my dad hands me a piece of notepaper marked with a skeletal outline in his handwriting. It consists of just a few broad headings: "Family History." "So … do you want to take one of these cat egories and dive into it?" "I want to dive in," he says confidently. "Well, in the first place, my mother was born in the village of Kehries--K-e-h-r-i-e-s--on the Greek island of Evia …" With that, the session is under way. We are sitting here, doing this, because my father has recently been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The disease has metastasized widely throughout his body, including his bones, liver, and brain. It is going to kill him, probably in a matter of months. So now my father is telling the story of his life. This will be the first of more than a dozen sessions, each lasting an hour or more. As my audio recorder runs, he describes how he used to explore caves when he was growing up; how he took a job during college loading ice blocks into railroad boxcars.