Cerify

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Inspiration

Dementia affects millions worldwide, diminishing cognitive function and impacting quality of life. We wanted to create an engaging and beneficial tool that aids patients with dementia by preserving and stimulating cognitive abilities through fun, interactive games. Inspired by apps like Duolingo, which gamify learning, we envisioned Cerify seh-rih-fai to offer a similar experience for cognitive health, keeping patients engaged while targeting specific brain functions and allowing caregivers to monitor and administer exercises to their patients.

What it does

Cerify is a mobile app that provides patients with dementia with stimulating cognitive activities tailored to preserve and enhance brain function. The app includes tracks targeting different cognitive functions, each containing activities designed to engage specific brain regions. Current activities include:

Memory Match: A card-matching game to boost short-term and visual memory.
Attention Games: A "whack-a-mole" style game to improve concentration and reaction time.

Additionally, Cerify offers an analytics page to track user progress, daily reminders to encourage consistent engagement, and adaptive learning algorithms that adjust difficulty based on the user's performance-- caregivers of the user can also adjust the difficulty on behalf of the user.

How we built it

We developed the front end of Cerify in React Native for cross-platform accessibility, ensuring it’s available to users on both Android and iOS. The back end, built using ExpressJS, handles user data and game progression, while MongoDB Atlas is our choice for storing user profiles, progress analytics, and game performance. This architecture allows for real-time data tracking and adaptability to users' needs.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was designing activities that are both cognitively beneficial and easy to interact with for our target users. Choosing helpful games while balancing simplicity with effectiveness required extensive research and iteration. This was the first time our group had programmed for a mobile device so overcoming the initial hurdle of coding for a newer environment was a challenge.

Another problem we ran into came up when we were trying to implement one of our games. We planned on having a game where users can see a sentence on the screen and would have to read it back to the microphone. We planned to do this by using AWS S3 buckets to store the .m4a files stored by the Expo-av library and passing them into AWS Transcribe to output the text. We were able to get the uploads to the S3 buckets working, but after trying to implement them with Transcribe, unfortunately, we were not able to fully implement it within the allotted time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have developed an app with a modern UI that can make a real difference in the lives of dementia patients and their families. Implementing a gamified experience that balances engagement with cognitive benefits was a confusing idea at first, but we achieved a simple yet impactful solution. Additionally, our progress tracking and analytics feature enables family members or caregivers to monitor the user’s improvement over time, making it more than just a game and gives it the potential to be analyzed by AI models in the future.

What we learned

We learned a lot about designing for accessibility and the importance of user-centered design, especially for an audience with specific needs. We also gained experience in working with mobile devices, refining our approach to be both responsive and supportive to users’ individual abilities and progress.

What's next for Cerify

We plan to expand Cerify by adding more cognitive activities that target a broader range of brain functions, such as language, executive function, and auditory processing. Our reach goals include integrating a brain model visualization that lights up to show progress, as well as implementing an advanced machine learning model to customize the experience further. This model will use performance data in the cognitive activities to provide more challenging exercises to further stimulate brain activity. This proof of concept sets the stage for this feature, since we store analytics data in MongoDB, which can later be vectorized and used to train the model. Eventually, we aim to provide reports that medical professionals can review to help in tracking cognitive health and suggesting personalized care adjustments.

Check out our github page to learn more!