Care4Me: An Alzheimer Diagnosis and Progression App

Inspiration

Our inspiration was from the sheer number of deaths between loved ones and the rest of the world per year. Brianna's grandmother recently passed away from Alzheimer's so this topic is close to her heart.

More than 5 Million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s
By 2050, it could rise to 16 Million
Every 66 seconds, someone develops this disease
Alzheimer’s is the 6th leading cause of death
Kills more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined
Since 2000, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease increased by 89%.
In most of these cases, 65% of these victims were UNAWARE OF THE STAGE OR MEDICATIONS THAT WERE AVAILABLE In addition, our team member's family member also suffers from this disease. By seeing this disease and its horrifying effects on a day to day basis, we have been affected both personally and mentally to ensure an accurate, and early, self diagnosing app that is available to everyone and is interactive to meet everyone's needs.

What it does

Care4Me is a self-diagnostic app using interactive questions to test cognitive skills and give data on progression. In addition, it provides questions that not only test individual portions of the brain, but it tests all the parts through interactive questions that target each purpose of the brain.

How we built it

Hardware used:

Arduino 101 Industrial Board: Used to simulate problem solving scenarios to analyze the capability of the cerebrum of the brain.
JGrasp: Used to control the Graphical User Interface that consists of buttons, panels, and labels that manipulate the input through the interface’s network to achieve a diagnosis and score report.
Intel Beginner Components: Used to indicate varying signs of voltage to display an LED pattern to test the capabilities of the hippocampus (problem solving portion) of the brain. We provided questions, like judgement and problem solving categories, to interact with each part of the brain. Also, the use of Arduino helped to make parts of the test interactive to meet everyone's needs.

Challenges we ran into

Originally, we planned to have alternating panels switch with the implementation of a button. However, because of the sheer amount of questions that we used, having separate panels would not have been efficient. As we wanted to have enough questions to have a thorough analysis, we decided to make our changes on only two individual panels.

In addition, Arduino 101 Software is a very finicky program to work with in different interfaces. Hence, we had to switch the code between different interfaces to have the most clear and efficient output.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having an app that is self diagnosing so that people of different races and socioeconomic statuses can use it.

What we learned

We faced many challenges with finicky Arduino programs and the inability to have various panels running at the same time to simulate different screens. We learnt to use different interfaces to test code on various platforms to check its efficiency, rather than just sticking to one platform.