Memory Lane

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Chatting with memory lane
Sending a chat/ending the session
Generating A Narrative

Inspiration

Driven by the shortage of care home volunteers for dementia patients, we created an app that combines AI and narrative storytelling to deliver reminiscence therapy. Our goal is to support caregivers by easing their workload while enhancing patients' emotional connection to their cherished memories.

What it does

Memory Lane encourages meaningful discussions with dementia patients through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface tailored to their needs, helping them recall and share past life events. From these conversations, it creates and delivers personalized emotional narratives accompanied by AI-generated images to reinforce memories and foster connection.

How we built it

We developed this application using a ReactJS front end, and a Flask Backend. We leveraged built in browser language detection as well as OpenAI's text to speech and generative text APIs to simulate reminiscence therapy with care home volunteer. For the narrative component we used Dall-e 3 to generate images pertaining to the crafted story.

Challenges we ran into

The process of identifying a problem we could solve with the technologies we knew consumed more time than expected leading to less development time. During development we encountered some web development specific errors related to CORs policy and Flask Caching, which we eventually resolved with the support of the mentors at Qhacks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have had the chance to learn and utilize new technologies to contribute towards a meaningful cause within such a tight time frame. We strongly believe our product can be impactful for dementia patients.

What we learned

We learned more about developing accessible user interfaces in React, as well as learning to use speech to text and text to speech technologies to provide seamless communication for all users. Furthermore, we experimented with prompt engineering, which ultimately allowed our project to succeed and work fluently.

What's next for Memory Lane

Our next steps include introducing user accounts, enabling patients to save and revisit their personalized narratives whenever they like. Additionally, we plan to pilot the app in dementia care homes with real patients to refine and enhance its impact based on real-world feedback.