Smrityalayam

Inspiration

Imagine not being able to pay attention consistently or remember things you were once perfectly able to. That's the reality for so many elderly people, and there is a lack of proper personalization possibilities in the current cognitive gaming apps.

What it does

Smrityalayam (meaning "Abode of Memories") was inspired by the need for a culturally rooted, personalized cognitive rehabilitation platform tailored for North-East Indian and pan-Indian elders.

• Personalized Memory Capsules: Upload family photos and stories powered by Vision Language Models (VLM) to generate custom story sequences and nostalgic recall activities.
• Culturally Rooted Cognitive Games: Regional heritage matching (such as North-East Indian instruments like Duitara and Pena), music-to-memory matching, and chronological story sequencing games.
• Multilingual Accessibility & Read-Aloud: Full internationalization support (English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu) with built-in text-to-speech for seamless accessibility without technical barriers.
• Caregiver & Telemetry Hub: Monitored progress tracking, daily reminders, and biometric tracking interfaces (Fitbit telemetry) to support caregivers and family members in real-time.
• Community & Peer Engagement: A dedicated community hub where elders can share memories, connect over heritage topics, and stay socially engaged.

How we built it

Built with Next.js 15 (App Router), TypeScript, React 19, and Tailwind CSS for a responsive, high-contrast, elder-friendly user interface.

Challenges we ran into

• Accessibility for Elders: Designing a clean, high-contrast UI with large touch targets while avoiding overwhelming modern visual clutter.
• Dynamic Client Hydration & Web APIs: Speech synthesis and browser storage can introduce Next.js SSR hydration mismatches; we built robust mounting checks and error boundaries to guarantee smooth performance.
• Multilingual Data Mapping: Ensuring seamless fallback mechanisms across 6 regional Indian languages without missing UI keys or broken text overlays.

What we learned

Techniques for building fault-tolerant Next.js applications that operate reliably across different browser environments and devices.

What's next for Smrityalayam

• Deeper VLM Integration: Automated image captioning and nostalgic story generation using multimodal LLMs.
• IoT & Wearable Integration: Live Bluetooth/API sync with Fitbit and smartwatches for real-time stress and heart-rate monitoring during cognitive exercises.
• Offline PWA Support: Full Progressive Web App (PWA) capability so elders in rural regions can play memory games without active internet access.

Built With

• next.js
• tailwind-css
• typescript