MeMore
Cognitive-training app for people with Alzheimer's Disease
About:
Memore is the result of nine months of hard work in my final thesis. Due to the increasing amount of dementia patients worlwide, I thought about developing an app that would adress the serious games from a game design perspective, implementing some aspects that could enhace the chance of these games to catch the attention of potential players.
The possibility of including customization aspects designed for each player was the key for the development of my project, which ended up being a prototype that I hope I can continue developing in the future.
The Project:
After doing some research in brain-training apps, I realized that they were too general and didn't take into consideration the personal aspects of each user, which often led them to giving up on the training.
My solution was to design a simple and modular app (which could be expanded in the future) with customized parameters such as the difficulty of each game and the content of it. For a person diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease it's not the same to do a puzzle of a general dog than doing a puzzle with the picture of their own and beloved puppy.
But developing an user-friendly app was not the only essential aspect, as the care-givers that take care of this people have to know if they are making any progress. Therefore, implementing an statistics module which would show how the player did on each game has also been an important part of the project.
My Work:
During these nine months of development of the project, I have worked on different fields to, in the end, coming up with a valid solution:
- Project Management: essential for dealing with deadlines and ending up with a formal report of my project.
- Game Design: taking into consideration all the things the player enjoys and designing each minigame to be meaningful was crucial.
- Programming: all the implementation of the app was done by me, so I had to flex my programming muscles and learn some new techniques.
- User Research: I developed various surveys to make sure that the app would be interesting for the players, as well as I interviewed some caregivers in daily centres. (the survey can be checked in this link: https://forms.gle/r6uo9pmtvx6nM4kg9 )
- App Research: to try to summarize which were their strong and weak points.
- Alzheimer's Disease research: to develop an app designed for people with dementia, I had to do some research to know which problems they have and how to approach them.
- User Interface Design: related to the topic before, designing a comfortable UI for the players is essential.
- Software Architecture: to optimize the development of the code.
- Occupational Therapy: each minigame had to make sense and support the player in some way, otherwise this wouldn't be a brain-training app.
- 3D modelling and 2D graphics: necessary to make the app visually attractive and to develop a logo for the app.
MeMore in the future:
With the Covid-19 crisis it's impossible to continue the development of this app, because my intention was to test the prototype on some patients, so the development is frozen for now. However, I think that apps like this one can be successful in the future, so I will try to continue doing it as soon as I can.
Details:
- Developed in Unity
- Scored 9.737 out of 10 in the thesis grading.
- Stopped development.
