When I sit in a meeting with my daughter and a disability funding assessor, I am used to one thing: being asked to start from the beginning.
Which situations trigger distress. How she communicates when something is wrong. The daily routines that took years to develop.
I answer the questions each time because none of it exists anywhere else. Not in any system. Not accessible to the next worker who walks through the door.
That frustration led me, a technopreneur born and raised in Mumbai, to build MyLog: New Zealand’s first disability care diary, goal tracker and funding management platform.
No parent should have to keep re-explaining their child’s whole life to a new worker every few months.
A gap the system wasn’t fixing
The problem is not unique to my family. Over 50,000 disabled New Zealanders rely on rotating support workers.
Every time a provider changes, and they change often, the accumulated knowledge of a person’s care, their preferences, triggers, communication style and daily rhythms simply disappears.
It is not stored anywhere that travels with them.
With over 16 years of work experience across the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, along with CPD certifications in social work and disability practice, I understood the gap from both sides — as a professional and as a father.
I waited for someone to fix it. When no one did, I built the fix myself.
MyMate Limited
Every parent of a child with a disability carries a kind of invisible weight. You become the historian, the advocate, the interpreter, all at once. You remember everything because you must. Because if you forget, or if something happens to you, that knowledge disappears with you.
That fear of being the sole keeper of my child’s story is what drove me to build something that remembers on my behalf.
Today, every goal reached, every difficult day navigated, and every small breakthrough is logged, dated and preserved. Not just in memory, but in a system that belongs to the whole family.
The day I realised the record would outlast any care worker, any funding cycle, any agency — even my daughter and me — that’s when I knew MyLog was much bigger than I thought.
How it works
MyLog is built around a simple idea. Each day, a family member or support worker logs a short entry guided by Te Whare Tapa Whā, covering family, physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.
It records what happened, how the person responded, what worked, and what didn’t. Three minutes, and it’s done.
The information is stored securely, and crucially, it belongs to the family, not the agency or provider. When workers change, the record stays.
When a funding review comes around, families can generate a professionally formatted PDF report with everything already documented.
The platform also includes Goal Tracking, where families set goals and trends are captured automatically across daily entries, and a Funding Management module that consolidates every support stream in one place.
No other disability tool in New Zealand currently offers this.
What families and support workers say
Annette Laloo, a support worker with NZCL Disability Support Services, cares for my daughter three times a week.
After I invited her to start using MyLog, she noticed the difference quickly.
“The system is straightforward, pre-filled with all the aspects of wellbeing, so logging an entry takes minutes rather than being another task to dread,” she says.
“Now the family can see exactly what happened on any given day, how she was doing, and what we worked on together.”
Annette is direct about what she thinks the tool represents, “What Ajit has built fills a gap that honestly should have been addressed by the Government years ago.”
Heather McBride, a mother whose child has three different carers, is seriously considering the platform.
“It makes life so much easier for the person with the disability, their caregivers and their family,” she says.
“It is all in one place, it goes with the disabled person, especially if they have more than one carer. They can all read what has occurred previously.”
Taloline Manatupu, another mother of a child with additional needs, put it simply, “As a mum of a special needs child, I think MyLog helps me connect with all the carer support who comes and support my child.”
From Mumbai to MyMate
I grew up in Mumbai, the youngest of three siblings in a middle-class family. My father served in the Indian Navy.
After completing a Bachelor of Commerce at Mumbai University, I found my calling in design and technology, freelancing as a graphic and web developer for years before immigrating to New Zealand in 2002.
With over 35 years of experience across design and technology, I have channelled all of it through MyMate Limited into tools built for communities overlooked by the mainstream market.
Alongside MyLog, I have also developed MyVaak — New Zealand’s first Medical Triage Language Interpreter for clinicians.
The platform helps clinics communicate with patients in Hindi, Arabic, Gujarati, Te Reo, Samoan, Tamil, Mandarin, Tagalog and many other languages.
Currently, 25 languages are live, with new languages regularly being added, and the service is free for ethnic migrant communities.
For Indian, Asian, Middle Eastern and Pacific families navigating the New Zealand healthcare system, it addresses something very real.
Available now: MyLog is live at www.mylog.co.nz, with plans from just 50c/day. Unlimited caregivers can be added to any plan.
Visit https://mylog.co.nz/ to know more.
As a fellow member of NZ’s Indian diaspora, I am offering first fifty of The Indian Weekender readers 14 days of free access to MyLog — no strings attached and no contract.
Simply email ajit@mymate.co.nz with the subject line “IWK - Free Trial” and I will send you a personal access code.
This story was contributed by Ajit Kumar Nair.
Ajit Kumar Nair is the Founder and Director of MyMate Limited, an Auckland-based technology company building tools for communities that the mainstream market overlooks.
He is the creator of MyLog and MyVaak, and has over 35 years of experience across design, technology and the social sector.
He can be reached at ajit@mymate.co.nz.
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