If you’ve ever seen the movie “Alice,” you probably won’t know about Alzheimer’s. This disease will cause the patient to lose memory, causing brain atrophy for the patient.
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To overcome this disease, a Timeless application was born. This application will help patients remember events and maintain and connect with family and friends through AI-based facial recognition. It is entirely possible to improve the quality of life for Alzheimer’s patients.Join Tech 50 Plus in the story of this 12-year-old professional …
The origin story of the Alzheimer’s app development project
This clever app design idea is on a true story of a 12-year-old girl from Hong Kong. The story is that her grandmother has had Alzheimer’s disease for many years. At that time, she began to forget many things that were important to her. To stay connected with her grandmother, she and her family used an iPad device to transfer pictures to her. Thanks to that, the whole family can hope that she will be able to memorize all the family members.
However, when Alzheimer’s disease became more and more severe, the Ipad was no longer effective.
At the same time, she also needs a caregiver to be able to remember and perform daily activities: take medicine, eat breakfast, etc. Because even with simple exercises, it is difficult for her to do it herself. Okay.
After using many different methods for a while, she came up with a bold idea for a mobile application that helps Alzheimer’s patients remember events and stay connected with their family and friends.
Previously, there have not been any applications to assist people with Alzheimer’s disease with the same idea as the one above. At the same time, with similar applications, it is not suitable for the elderly. Because technology is always an obstacle for the elderly, most of them will not be able to perform proficient operations.
To realize her desire to help her remember all the information every day, she began to learn how to code in Swift – the iOS programming language. Since then, an application dedicated to people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia diseases was born called Timeless.
What is App Timeless?
Timeless is an easy-to-use mobile app developed to help people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. The patient can remember events, maintain interaction and connect with friends, relatives, and family-based on facial recognition technology of artificial intelligence.
With the Timeless app, it includes four main functions:
- Update: This feature will provide patients with a regular feed of family and friends’ photos. All those people will be repeated regularly so that the patient can remember them based on AI facial recognition technology.
- Today: This feature will provide reminders of the day’s activities. Patients can then better manage their lives. To keep things simple, the app will only show 2 moves. Experts in Alzheimer’s disease recommend it.
- Contact: This feature includes a phone book so that patients can contact their loved ones without remembering their phone numbers.
- Identify: This identification feature will allow the patient to use the phone’s camera to identify who is in front of them using facial recognition technology.
All these 4 features are in phase one of the Timeless application development project. It helps solve almost any difficulty that people with Alzheimer’s disease face. This application does not need to use a password, and it logs in with Touch-ID or Face-ID. Therefore, the patient will not need to remember the password during use.
Currently, you can use Timeless on all Apple devices including from iPhone 6 with iOS 11 and above operating system and Ipad. In the following stages, the manufacturer will continue to expand the flexibility of Timeless. It can be used on many different devices and add many new features, helping to improve the quality of life for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Funding Sources and Challenges
Timeless’s idea was tested in early April 2016. This idea has won many accolades and awards from experts. To perfect the best project, the producer needed the help of many experts like Ms. Liliia Mandrino – a Human Experience Designer based in Dallas, Texas, who provided kind support to improve the UX / UI design of the application.
However, a challenge is how to make this product known to more people and the funding source for the applications. Timeless’s next stage of development is still fraught with difficulties. Issuer funding need is around $50k with 3 main goals:
- 10,000 – Complete Phase I
- design and development 20,000 – Phase II design and development
- $20,000 – Maintenance & First-Year Support + Marketing and Advertising Expenses
Timeless will undoubtedly have massive growth in both scale and technology used in the future. Therefore, people with Alzheimer’s will have more opportunities to secure and improve their quality of life. So, with the limitations of the initial investment, the story can be solved by the actual effectiveness of this application.