I'm happy to know that others endure the frustration of dealing friend or spouse that wants to ride a bike, but won't grasp the concept of gearing.
Those of you whose friend or significant other understood this from the get-go even though they never biked before, I'm very envious. Until you have some experience dealing with someone like this you'll just never understand.
This is where you probably need a system that you can set to maintain a specific torque load on the pedals and will change the gearing to make that happen. An infinite gearing system will be great for this.
I've thought about IGH hubs before. Now looking at them again I see there are some they call variable speed and have a range of ratios from .5 to 1.9. But that I guess is the ratio for how many times the rear shaft and external sprocket turn. I'll have put pen to paper and figure out what the ratio will be between the crankset and the wheel to see how that compares to the high and low gearing I feel is needed.