Senior Buddy

All our memories, one voice command away. Reminiscing made convenient and accessible

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Inspiration

This is Kiran Kadekoppa. One of the team members on Senior Buddy.

I along with my wife and kids, visit our parents and extended family every 12-18 months in India. This has been the ritual for over a decade since we relocated to the State side.

These visits are much more than just a typical vacation for pleasure and relaxation. They are opportunities to relive the past, to walk down memory lane with my parents and loved ones. During our time we take 100s of pictures /videos of random things - the laughs, and the emotions are captured. These images just stay put in our galleries stacked with newer images and videos and become pretty inaccessible to all of us, especially the senior folks who have to put in a lot of effort to go back and scroll through the images for revisiting their favorite memory of their grandchildren.

These memories eventually just end up as foggy and hazy moments in our heads. That made our team thinking, what if we find a way to make these memories accessible to our seniors. With the use of Alexa, we thought we could build a personal assitant for the seniors to recollect and relive key moments of their lives that they spent with loved ones.

What it does

Senior Buddy is an Alexa skill with a companion app. Users can add their families on the app and each of the family members can leave each other voice notes. Users can also record audio that they capture during a family gettogether like Thanksgiving, New Years eve, Christmas or birthdays.

All of these recorded memories are stored and compartmentalised in a way where if the user wants to revisit any of their memories, all they have to say is Alexa, play my memories from Christmas 2019 or New Years 2022 or my last birthday. That would play the audio files that were recorded during those specified moments

Seniors often love listening to their children and grandchildren. This skill allows them to play back memories and voice notes they have with their loved ones how many ever times they want, whenever they want without lifting a finger

How we built it

We built it in the following steps:

  1. We went around asking seniors what is the one thing they would love to have
  2. Overwhelmingly, they replied they want to spend more time with their loved ones, they want to play back videos, images, audio files of their memories
  3. However, they aren't tech savvy enough to navigate through the complex UI of gallery that often gets stacked with newer media files making it difficult for seniors to go back and check on their memories easily
  4. We designed a system where seniors can revisit memories with just their voice
  5. To capture voice, we knew we needed a companion app. So using react-native we created a companion app where a family can add family members and record voice notes
  6. These voice notes are then saved and compartmentalized in the backend, converted to the audio format that alexa supports
  7. We created a robust interaction model that covers use cases for seniors to call back on their memories from various festivals, voice notes recorded by their grandchildren, etc
  8. We coded the lambda function and attached it with the microservices we made for the app to make it all functional
  9. To have consistency of user, we used Oauth2.0 to create account linking for the app with the device

Challenges we ran into

  1. Conversion of Audio to alexa supported format on the fly
  2. Creating the interaction model that covers different kinds of family members, festivals
  3. System design of orchestrating all the user intents with the responses
  4. Creating dynamic relations and shared access to voice notes across users

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have piloted this across 10 seniors in our network, and all of them had tears in their eyes. That made our day :)

What we learned

Working on technology is amazing and cool but what makes it most exhillirating is when we make it accessible and touch hearts of the users like never before

What's next for Senior Buddy

We plan on adding new features

  1. Attach it with APL so that the memories are not audio alone
  2. Create a dynamic system for users to add their special moments and not just festivals
  3. Add more engaging features like trivia, games, exercise modules to make senior buddy a one stop alexa skill for seniors engagement.
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