AlzBuddy – Two students design app for Alzheimer’s patients

Vedant Tapiavala and Rithvik Ganesh were just two high school students from Texas when they designed an app to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia. The study "Estimation of the global prevalence of dementia in 2019 and forecasted prevalence in 2050: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019" estimates that 57 million people were living with dementia worldwide in 2019, and that number is expected to rise to an astounding 153 million by 2050. Therefore, it is imperative to implement risk reduction policies and improve existing therapeutics, while also upgrading the available palliative care. The last one was the path the two inventive students decided to follow.

After a volunteering experience at a memory care nursing center in their hometown, they gained inspiration to design the app AlzBuddy. This interactive memory care assistant resorts to melodies, pictures, and playful games to help reignite memories of people living with early-stage dementia and Alzheimer's.

The sounds module of the AlzBuddy app contains over 200 sounds - songs, commercials, speeches, animal sounds, and more - embedded directly within the application. The pictures tab has a selection of over 100 pictures with descriptions, which help the user remember and reminisce about key figures and items throughout their lives. The game module includes a color grid game suggested by a medical professional to engage and challenge the user, a picture association game suggested by a nursing home, and a memory game.

AlzBuddy is a free app available for both iOS and Android.

This story was adapted from: https://www.alzint.org/news-events/news/new-data-predicts-the-number-of-... and https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/north-texas-high-school-students-desig...

The images were taken from: https://augustemobile.wixsite.com/alzbuddy and