When ideating this app, we firstly took inspiration from personal connections to this track. One team member mentioned her grandparents as possible beneficiaries that MEMENTOS strives to help. During these extremely difficult times, this team member found it very difficult to remind her grandparents to take their medicine every day such as Metamorphine to combat their Type 2 diabetes. In addition, being thousands of miles away from her grandparents created a gap in the personal connections that this team member yearned for in these scarily-isolating times. Thus, our team generated ideas from this baseline and implemented designs with a variety of features that we liked and thought had the potential to significantly enhance the efficacy of our app. One major concept we drew from was the idea of readability and user-friendly interfaces specifically designed for the elderly, as we realized that a lot of technology is not made with the needs of the older generation in mind, which could account for the disparity in technological literacy across age groups. Furthermore, we were greatly inspired by the concept of Augmented Reality and its diverse applications, as we felt it could be creatively applied to the problem of memory loss among the elderly. Lastly, we modelled the social connectivity feature of MEMENTOS off of existing social connection platforms (such as the Snapchat Bitmoji map), which further added to the value of our design.
Mementoes is a personal assistant app for the elderly. This app addresses the intersection of memory loss, loneliness, and inexperience with technology among the elderly. It provides users with reminders of important appointments, a location guide for their commonly used items, personalized audio messages from loved ones, an AR recognition software to help them remember people, and a social connection feature that allows them to chat with others!
We built the AR components and mobile app using Swift and RealityKit. I also used Reality Composer tool pre-equipped with Xcode. In addition, we used reputable sites, research papers, and advice from mentors to help us create an informed decision on how our product would be a solution for the issues seniors face which are feeling disconnected due to not having loved ones around and seniors often having trouble with remembering their daily routines and activities.
This was a HUGE build. Thankful to the mentors available, Many of us are first Hackers and This is the first time we created an app related to healthcare, and first time team learned about app development and Augmented reality. I had to read the documentation several times to understand how to enable AR world tracking, Face Recognition AR World and include Memories of a respective person recognised. Near the project's end, We faced some errors which took time to resolve them.
Throughout the course of this hackathon, our team strived for strong communication, teamwork, and work ethic. Through this team effort, we were able to collaboratively create a prototype that assists seniors in their daily lives and allows them to stay connected with their loved ones. MEMENTOS has a very senior-friendly interface and brings a personal touch to the technology that seniors use, making technology more inviting and less intimidating to the elderly.
What we learned A team with shared goals and passions along with diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds works marvellously together to create novel solutions for pressing problems in today’s society. Throughout the past two days, we integrated new concepts into our application design and development process. In addition, those of us who had no prior experience in app development acquired a few basics, both through the very intriguing workshops and through collaboration with our teammates. We all worked extremely well together, balancing each others’ strong suits to design MEMENTOS and develop a presentation and clearly highlighted the app’s main features. By doing so, we all certainly developed strong communication, teamwork, and organization skills. MedHacks allowed us to learn new concepts such as how to use Flutter for front-end development; how impactful AI is in medical decision making; and how important teamwork is to developing large projects such as a mobile app like MEMENTOS.
We hope to reach a wider audience with this app through the addition of a translation option and additional features such as a scheduler, item inventory, and friend locator. The translation option will make the app more accessible to those whose first language is not English. In addition, the schedule and item inventory features will be helpful to those who tend to be forgetful or who suffer from memory loss. Lastly, the friend locator will allow users to feel more connected to their friends as they can see their whereabouts and plan potential meetups. During the age of social distancing and COVID-19, the friend locator serves as an additional comfort, as users can see their friends are close by even though they cannot meet in person.
augmented-reality figma firebase ios swift