Timeless - A mobile app for Alzheimer's patients

Alzheimer’s Disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that affects 44 million people worldwide. As a result of the illness, Alzheimer’s patients experience difficulties with their memory, which interferes greatly with their daily lives. Unlike other chronic illnesses, Alzheimer’s disease prevalence is on the rise with 160 million globally projected to suffer from the disease by 2050. Not only does the disease affect the patient, but also caregivers, including family, friends and care professionals.

In order to help Alzheimer’s patients cope with memory loss, researchers and experts suggest stimulating the patient’s memory by looking at photos, repeating information, and helping them to recognize and remember people by finding ways to provide reminders or explanations. Additionally, according to a study done in April 2016, adoption and use of a mobile health application in older adults can improve the user’s well-being, especially as acceptability of the app continues and improves over time.

In order to solve this problem, I developed Timeless, a simple mobile application that helps Alzheimer’s patients, their caregivers, and their loved ones by helping the patient remember events, stay engaged with what’s happening with friends and family, easily contact friends and family, and remember and recognize people and their relationships to them, something that seems trivial to others but not for Alzheimer’s patients.

Timeless has two key features: Updates and Identify. Updates is a stream of photos and videos shared by a circle of family and friends. Each photo is tagged with the names and relationships to the patient of the people in the photo. Identify allows the patient to take a picture of a face to find out who it is and their relationship to the patient. Both of these core features are powered by Artificial-Intelligence-based Facial Recognition technology. The technology leverages high-performance algorithms to find, understand, and identify the face in the photo based on previously learned faces.

Timeless also includes a Contact feature that allows patients to call or text loved ones easily and prevent them from making repeated calls, and a Today feature that shows a calendar of the patient’s appointments and events of the day. These functionalities address the most important needs of Alzheimer’s patients and keep them connected to their friends and family.

Timeless is currently being fully developed into an iPhone app and will go into beta testing second half of 2017. Access to patients for testing the app will be critical for Timeless. When completed, the app will potentially have a large outreach and will hopefully enable Alzheimer’s patients to stay connected with friends and family and cherish the timeless moments in life.

Please stay connected to Timeless by following its Facebook page @ https://www.facebook.com/app.Timeless/

https://vimeo.com/197161954