ASSISTIVE TECH & ACCESSIBILITY
Enabling seniors to share their life stories
Memory Keeper is an assistive storytelling tool and digital companion designed to help seniors share and preserve their life stories.
The Challenge
Reminiscence therapy involves trained interviewers guiding seniors to share and reflect on meaningful life experiences, often using personal objects to stimulate memory and conversation. However, it is time-consuming, costly, and many centres are under-staffed to deliver consistent, high-quality therapy to every senior.
The Outcome
Memory Keeper is an assistive storytelling tool and digital companion designed to help seniors, including those with early-stage dementia, share and preserve their life stories. Through interactive conversation and reflection, a narrative is actively shaped in real time. The tool identifies storytelling/comprehension gaps and prompts follow-up questions to produce a coherent and personal story, written in the senior’s own voice. At the end, the story is compiled into a PDF to share with their loved ones.
Our Process
While these stages were non-linear and highly interconnected, they have been organized below to provide a clearer overview of our approach.
1/Research
To understand dementia and its place within the healthcare ecosystem in Singapore and New Zealand, we synthesized medical literature and interview insights from geriatric healthcare practitioners and dementia specialists. This allowed us to develop a healthcare systems map and nuanced profiles representing various stages of early-stage dementia. The mapping allowed us to situate our profiles within real processes and pathways of the healthcare system.
Following several design cycles, we narrowed our focus to legacy preservation, or life stories that seniors wish to preserve with their families. We conducted surveys and interviews with seniors and their grandchildren to develop complementary perspectives.
Simplified examples of "Slow", "Lost", and "Blank" profiles
2/Product Strategy
We translated our research to bring together user needs and business viability to inform product strategy. Our competitive analysis and market sizing ensured Memory Keeper directly addresses existing needs and offers a unique value proposition. This allowed us to define a go-to-market strategy through potential partnerships with healthcare centres and funding sources.
3/Product Design
We designed a storytelling app which enables any senior to record and share their life stories. The app is designed with an AI system that actively prompts interactive conversation and reflection, based on techniques used by practicing specialists, such as reminiscence therapy. A complete narrative would then be constructed based on the user’s stories, which can be shared with their loved ones.
Screenshots of the app