Student invents app to aid Alzheimer’s disease patients inspired by his grandmother

The app, known as MemCare, works by keeping track of the movements and whereabouts of a person with Alzheimer's. That person wears a bracelet that allows one, with the app, to learn when the wearer is stationary for too long, or has wandered into a place that is not safe.

"I came up with the idea two years ago in a class," Dawson said. The class was entrepreneurship and the instructor, one Dawson said has been of great help to him in his growth as a student, was Vince Palumbo.

Dawson's grandmother, the late Johnnie Wil, he said, largely raised him. Wil suffered a stroke in her late 70s and then developed Alzheimer's to the point where she no longer recognized her grandson. She died at 94.

"I thought of this app because when I was in class I wasn't able to check in with her," he said.

Dawson recently won a $1,200 grant from the seed capital fund and business accelerator Shaker LaunchHouse and has started his own company, MEMcare LLC, to develop the technology so that the monitoring system could be commercially available to the public. He now is working to attract potential investors to create a marketing and manufacturing plan for the new application.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/1vPiNRK