ActiLivE

Inspiration

Last year, One of our group mates, Canqi, went to an elderly home to give a piano concert and was shocked -- the elderly home was in a poor condition; most of the seniors were in wheelchairs; and there were only a few caretakers for a lot of seniors. After the concert, she saw many of them crying and telling me that it was the first time they listened to a live concert since coming to the elderly home. She suddenly realized that our society needs to care much more about the elderly. And this was why we decided to create our unique platform, ActiLivE.

What it does

ActiLivE is a one-of-a-kind application where seniors create content for other seniors. Seniors can share instructional videos, pictures, and steps for activities they enjoy. Unlike other how-to apps, ActiLivE recognizes and caters the wide range of physical and mental abilities of seniors. Seniors can filter through activities using difficulty levels and tags. For example, for a senior suffering from mobility and memory problems, they can exclude the tags “mobility” and “memory” to find activities they can enjoy, stress-free. The ActiLivE community will try the activities then leave a review, improving this user-generated content in a positive-feedback loop. Finally, for seniors who don’t use apps, they can choose mailing subscriptions for printed activity cards to be delivered every week or month. The same customizability from the app will be available for mail subscribers as well.

How I built it

We used Figma to create this app.

Challenges I ran into

Coding an app is difficult in 24H

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud of our innovation. The features and the visuals on our app, ActiLivE are appealing and will provide for the aging population. One of the claims ActiLive provides is a sense of purpose. Through online live events and fun seminars seniors can participate in subjects they enjoy. Finding a sense of purpose has been a central theme in social psychology. According to Carl Rogers Humanistic theory the basic motive of all people is to reach self actualization. More specifically, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs show that people satisfy needs in a specific order from physiological to safety to belonging to self-esteem in order to reach self actualization

What I learned

We learned how severe the issue of social isolation is among the aging population.

What's next for ActiLivE

Moving forward, we can make the following improvements for ActiLivE in the future. We will use Google Cloud’s Video Intelligence API to suggest tags and categories under the uploaded videos and tutorials. This might make navigation on ActiLivE easier. Also, Google Cloud’s Machine Learning functions can recommend further similar videos after seniors finish watching a video tutorial. We can start with the local use of the application and then expand user demographics on a global scale. We can find partner charity organizations and schools to enrich the life of seniors. We can also expand to food delivery and direct messaging. Food delivery might be especially helpful to the elderly, since many of them have limited moving abilities.