Deutsche Bank hosted the "Hacking for Dementia" global hackathon in partnership with charity of the year Dementia UK, aiming to empower teams to ideate and develop innovative solutions that enhance care for dementia patients and their caregivers. My work team saw this as an opportunity to step away from our normal projects and work together on this exciting brief.

 

01 // The problem

Leading up to the hackathon, we research current pain points within the dementia care system and uncover 2 key insights for both dementia patients and caregivers.

• Firstly, individuals with dementia often struggle with short-term memory, making it difficult to recall recent events, appointments, and important information.

• The emotional impact of dementia leads to feelings of frustration, sadness, and
  isolation, often exacerbated by communication difficulties

While, as a caregiving:

• Once a dementia diagnosis is received, there is little to no way of understanding
  how this condition is affecting your loved one, causing stress surrounding
  financial planning, medical needs and planning for the future.

• Additionally, caregivers feel conflicted between how to balance providing their loved one with independence and humanity, all the while giving them the necessary support

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02 // The solution

Memento is an AI-powered journaling app designed to support dementia patients by encouraging cognitive engagement through daily prompts, helping them express emotions and track their condition. For caregivers, it offers data-driven insights into the patient's mental state and generates personalized care plans to provide appropriate support while maintaining the patient's independence.

03 // Our roles
Myself: I led a diverse team comprising a manager, front-end developers, back-end developers, DevOps engineers, and data analysts. My key responsibilities during this hackathon were:

• Leadership: Conducted mini stand-ups every two hours to ensure alignment on project vision and individual responsibilities while monitoring workload distribution to make sure all team members had tasks that contributed to the project's objectives.

• UX design: Designed the user experience for both the mobile application and the insight dashboard using Figma. Utilised reusable design systems, specifically Kitten UI and Google Material UI, to guide front-end development.

• Presentation: Developed a pitch deck that incorporated personal storytelling and user pain points to effectively communicate the solution's value to dementia patients and caregivers which I then co-presented at the regional presentation, showcasing the working solution and highlighting its impact on users.

The team:  The front-end developers used react native to create a user-friendly mobile application, while the back-end developers focused on integrating GPT-4o and Google Gemini, employing prompt engineering to enhance the app's AI capabilities. Meanwhile, the DevOps team successfully deployed the application on the Google Cloud Platform's App Engine, and a Power BI dashboard was developed to visualize insights gathered from the mobile app, providing valuable data for caregivers and stakeholders.​​

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04 // The outcome

While our team did not win the regional title, our team were able to successfully design, develop and deploy a functioning mobile application and Power BI dashboard within the 24-hours of the hackathon.

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