Details
Dementia assistive app
Cue helps people living with Alzheimer’s in accomplishing their daily routines, while relieving stress from care providers. Through our real-time monitoring platform, we aim to maximize quality of life by facilitating effective care.
Impact
Best in festival - Design for Health, Wellness, Aging and Inclusion
Top Finalist - RBC Ownr Pitch Competition
My role
Project Lead
UX/UI Design
UX Research
Team
Lisa Eunhye Yi
Adrian Liu
Parmis Rambet
Timeline
2019 - The first design was published
2020 - Started pitching the idea to hospitals and sponsors, and invited to several exhibitions.
2021 - Applied for student funding: seed money
the kick off
Problem finding
Why tackling the issue is important?
discovery & research
Ethnography, Literature Review and Market
We conducted a multi-methodology research effort to better understand how it looks like living with dementia, how they wish to improve their quality of life, their daily routine, and how academic researchers have sought to explore these questions in their relative fields of study.
User 1 – Dementia Patient
Dementia patients have difficulty following multiple step instructions and remembering daily routines and tasks that need to be achieved through out the day.
User 2 – Caregiver
Caregivers often get overwhelmed by trying to provide effective care while managing their own lives.
User Journey
Investigation:
The market splits into two segments: in-home human care services and digital/app-based caregiver tools. A gap appears to exist between the two — most apps focus on education or advice, while home care services are human-delivered but vary widely in specialization. A product bridging real-time support with caregiver training and smart-home safety (like Baycrest's sensor approach) seems underexplored.
the iterations
Physical device for the patients
Our initial design was a physical product. We sketched and created many different prototypes in the beginning. We had a feedback session where we could get critical subject matter expert's feedback on our initial prototype. Then, we, again, had another feedback session with the second prototype. After going through a variety of iteration, research, and user journey, We landed on a cueing platform.
Subject Matter Expertise Feedback
Presented to and Reviewed by more than 6 expertises of dementia care at Baycrest Hospital. They commented:
Digital iterations
Planning & Feature development
Final Design
Caregiver Interface
The caregiver interface allows them to set a certain task via app and push a notification as a cue helping client to achieve the task. This is especially useful when the caregiver is not next to the client.
Patient Interface
is designed with a simple, distinguishable, and non-irritating interface that is easy to operate, increasing the perceivability of information for older generations. Thus, it is achieved through features such as icons and bright contrasting colours.
Uniqueness
What’s unique about cue
Unlike anything currently on the market, our companion app connects caregivers and patients in a shared, real-time experience. Family members can also access the platform to monitor their loved one's condition throughout the day.
Our design uses icon-based visual cues to make routines easier to understand and follow — no text-heavy instructions, just clear, intuitive prompts. Caregivers can assign and track tasks remotely, from anywhere.
We know that routine is transformative for people living with dementia. Our system is built around that insight — helping clients build consistency, confidence, and independence over time.
Our next step
The Next Step: Starting a venture as a student
To accelerate our venture, we pursued funding and support across three key areas: front and back-end development, and subject matter expertise in dementia care. We prioritized partnerships with healthcare professionals who could offer both practical insight and evidence-based guidance as we built our solution.
We reached out to hospitals and potential sponsors to share our vision and explore opportunities for collaboration.
Showcase
Ambassador as a student from OCAD U
Since beginning to pitch our idea to hospitals and sponsors, we've been honoured to be invited to several exhibitions to showcase Project CUE.
We'd like to take this moment to sincerely thank the faculty and professors at OCAD U, as well as our partners at Baycrest Hospital, for their guidance and support throughout this journey. Their involvement has been invaluable — and we wouldn't be here without them.
🌱 Takeaways
Through out the 4 month journey, we learned about employing empathy and using user-centered design to develop a product. And very much enjoyed each process.
One area of success would be the dual apps that work together. What that could be improved would be to continue developing this app and expand it to be also used with wearable tech such as smart watches.
⚡ Challenges
As this is my and our team's first UX/UI project, we struggled in the beginning how we should approach the design process and the clients.
With the lack of business strategy, usability testing, and creative confidence, It was definitely a difficult task to find sponsors and potential collaborators.
But we were glad that ambiguity boosted our persistency. As we do more research and build our ideas and prototypes, we were encouraged as a team and able to finish the project successfully.
