Memory-Anchor

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  Final Home Page Design

Inspiration

We both have been personally affected by family members that have memory disabilities in our lives. In order to help prevent this crushing experience for others, we wanted to design something that can slow down the degradation of memory. We decided that the product would be most effective if it were a mobile app, since most people have access to mobile devices. Therefore, we came up with a project that challenges users to practice with their memory by giving them friendly reminders and hints about their days activities.

What it does

Memory-Anchor is an app that is designed for use on handheld devices that assists people in journalism. It tracks the user's location throughout the day and detects when it changes. At the end of the day, it will remind the user to recall the events of their day with a push notification, and gives them the choice to have slight hints about each activity before revealing exactly where they were. The app also presents a calendar for the user to navigate through their past logs.

How we built it

We knew the React Native framework would be extremely useful in making this app accessible for many, so we began there. Before beginning any coding, though, we planned out each view: the home page which navigates to the calendar or the recollection page, the calendar page which displays every day that the user has logged, the recollection page that allows the user to input data and reminds them of their day's events, and finally a single day page that displays the entries of a past date. Starting from the most necessary details, we built the data structures behind the raw geolocations, clustered visited locations, and complete day summaries. Then came all of the elements, state logic, and services (such as haversine distance clustering within 50m) that brings the app to life. We used generate AI to assist in the creation of this project.

Challenges we ran into

Coming into this project, we were both quite scared of the competition. Conceiving, building, testing, iterating, and presenting a project all in one day is a very daunting task, especially with it being the first hackathon for both of us!

We also had initial doubts, second doubts, and halfway doubts about our project's validity, it's overall value compared to others', and its originality. We wanted to create something innovative, but oftentimes it is hard to feel innovative in a world where you are surrounded by new ideas every day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We pushed through! We successfully created a working application that achieves our desired goal.

Successful IOS App

We have always wanted to create an app that works on an iPhone, and today we had the time and resources available to learn how! We were able to make clean UI and a navigable interface.

What we learned

Our First React Native App

We have had some coding experience before, but building with React Native was new to us. The combination of HTML and Javascript-like syntax and the powerful state mechanics were difficult to understand at first, but we can proudly say we came out of this learning something new.

What's next for Memory-Anchor

Obviously, we would give Memory-Anchor more configuration and accessibility options. We can create a settings page which would allow the user to change their theme, change the time that the daily push notification appears, and allow users to export their journal entries as CSVs or other data formats.

We think a really great use for Memory-Anchor would be as a research tool. Have people sign up for a long-term study to use the app for a few years, and track any correlations between dementia development and journalism practices. We firmly believe that actively practicing on memory can improve its lifespan.

Built With

• gemini
• react-native
• vscode
• xcode