Bloom

Bloom allows dementia patients to keep track of everyday tasks like meals and taking medicine, while continually reliving fond memories that their love ones send them in a simple iPad app.

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CHECK OUT BLOOM AT: bloomsapp.tech

Inspiration

My grandparents inspired Bloom. They suffer from dementia, and they sometimes even forget who I am. I wanted to create an app to help alleviate their symptoms. I don't get to see them often since they are back in Korea, so I hoped to create an app to stay connected with them.

What it does

Blooms allows dementia patients to stay healthy by keeping track of a simple to-do list of everyday tasks like meals and taking medicine. To relive their fond memories, patients can visit the family tree that is linked to a photo gallery of each family member. Family members create an account in the phone app to maintain the to-do list and send photo memories.

How we built it

We built Bloom as two web apps (tablet app for the user, phone app for family members) using React and Node.js. For our data store, we also use Azure SQL Database and Azure Blob Storage to store any data and image we need. We also used the Twilio API to send an alert SMS to family members if there is no checklist activity. Since our application revolves around sharing messages and photos with loved ones, this technology was crucial in the app's development.

Challenges we ran into

Our target user posed a unique challenge regarding the iPad app design, so we went through a lot of design iterations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the design outcome. We created a very simple UI that would be intuitive for our grandparents. This helps the learnability of the app, since we cannot rely on the memory of the patients to guide their experience through the app. The larger buttons and text were purposefully designed on the tablet app, while the phone app feels more familiar for younger family members.

What we learned

We learned a lot about user-centered design and full-stack development.

What's next for Bloom

We hope to do usability testing to learn more about the learnability of the app. We will also explore more features to add to Bloom. For example, the ability to schedule family video calls. Eventually, we would like to migrate Bloom to a native mobile app.

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