10 percent of the people in the world aged 65 and above have the Alzheimer’s disease – the progressive form of dementia that interferes with the memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability to carry out the easiest tasks.
In the early stages, the patient’s long-term memory is intact while recent information such as time and day may be forgotten. While it’s not preventable, the patient’s brain can be kept active so that the brain aging process can be slowed to some extent. This disease also has a powerful effect on the family members as it opens up heart wrenching emotional experiences having to watch their old parent or spouse in such a condition.
We therefore decided to come up with - a website to help the caretakers and family to keep the patient mentally occupied thereby helping in brain exercises.
The application serves as a platform to keep Alzheimer’s patients mentally occupied and aids their treatment process. It contains various sections such as News, My Circle, Identify, Games, Entertainment, Reminders. This user-friendly platform is of immense help to the caretakers as well. The various features of the website: Register yourself for free first to access all features.
- News section – Displays the latest news in snippets which we fetch using the news API. This is a great way to keep the patients aware of the events happening around the world especially in the early stages.
- My Circle – In the later stages, memory loss becomes far more severe – the patient may not recognize family members and may forget relationships. The caretakers can upload photos of family and friends along with their name and relationship so that the patients don’t forget their loved ones; they can be constantly reminded which might help in keeping memory intact to a certain extent.
- Reminders – This section is pretty useful for the caretakers where they can set reminders for the patients. They’ll be repeatedly notified starting about two hours prior to the scheduled event.
- Games – In order to keep the brain active, we have added two simple memory games for the patient to play. One is the memory cards game which we’ve all played before and the second is a simple quiz called ‘Guess Who’. This quiz is personalized for all patients wherein they are given a set of 5 photos of their family members (uploaded by the caretaker in the Circle section) and they have to guess who the person in the photo is. This, we feel, is truly a great way to exercise their memory while having fun in the process.
- Entertainment – Research suggests that listening to music can provide emotional and behavioural benefits to Alzheimer’s patients. We have therefore provided a feature for the caretakers to add YouTube video ids of the patient’s favourite music and dance videos (or any engaging video for that matter) and there’ll be a playlist ready for them to watch and enjoy.
- Identify – This is the live face recognition feature which we built using the JavaScript face api module. Whenever the patient seems to forget the name of a family member right in front of them, they can turn on the camera and use it for live recognition as well. The face recognition model uses the photos uploaded in the Circle section for training.
This website has been built using HTML, CSS and Javascript for the Frontend and Node.js for the backend along with MongoDB for data storage. We’ve also used Figma for designing the website. The APIs that we used include the News API, the YouTube API and the face api for face recognition.
We ran into some issues while building the face recognition section.
The fact that we were able to put together so many features and actually come up with a fully functioning user-friendly website.
Although the mobile version of the website works quite well, we hope to build an app out of this so that the user experience is improved.
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Clone the repository to your local directory
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git clone https://github.com/abhishek0405/Alzheimers-App.git -
Open cmd and cd to the same directory.
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Run this command on the terminal.
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node app.js
Now you can see our app running on 127.0.0.1:3000!
View the mobile version of the website by using Chrome devtools
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- Javascript
- HTML
- CSS
Homepage
News section
My Circle section
Quiz game
Memory cards game
Entertainment section
Reminders section
Face recognition section
