NeuroTrace

Inspiration

My grandmother started showing early signs of dementia last year. Watching her struggle with existing tools, clinical, cold, designed like tests, made me realize the problem wasn't disease management. It was the experience. Every app felt built for a doctor's clipboard, not for a person who just wanted to feel okay. NeuroTrace started as something I wished existed for her.

What it does

NeuroTrace is a cognitive care companion for dementia patients built around a living garden metaphor.

• 🌿 A living garden that blooms as patients complete gentle exercises across Memory, Language, Reasoning, and Creativity
• 🧠 A Digital Brain Twin that maps activity to real brain regions visually. Skip memory exercises, the Hippocampus declines. Do them, it heals.
• 📊 Passive clinical telemetry tracking Hesitation Index, Motor Efficiency, and Flow Score
• 🎨 A Memories gallery preserving every creative moment without grading it
• ♿ Full accessibility suite built for real cognitive and physical challenges

No timers. No failure states. No red wrong screens. For someone with dementia, the act of trying is the victory.

How we built it

Built using AI-assisted vibe coding, moving from concept to deployed product fast. Every design decision, warm tones, botanical imagery, soft typography, was made deliberately for an audience that standard UX assumptions fail completely.

Challenges we ran into

Designing for dementia patients means rethinking everything. Tap targets, motion, color contrast, failure feedback all had to be rebuilt from scratch. Making something feel warm and safe while capturing clinically useful data was a genuinely hard balance.

Accomplishments we're proud of

The Digital Brain Twin. Making abstract cognitive health feel personal and visual without being frightening. And building something with no failure states at all, which goes against every game design instinct but was exactly right for this user.

What we learned

Accessibility is not a feature. For this audience it is the entire product. One wrong design decision and a patient quits forever.

What's next for NeuroTrace

Caregiver dashboards, neurologist report exports, and longitudinal tracking so families can see real progress over weeks, not just individual sessions.

Built With

• framer-motion
• html/css
• radix-ui
• react
• react-router
• tailwind-css
• typescript
• vite