Overview
MedDementia (styled 'Medementia') is a medication-tracking app for dementia care, built by a five-person hackathon team. Every screen is designed around one moment: a patient looks at their phone, sees a personalized greeting, a photo of the pill they need to take, and one large checkbox to tap when it's done, with a help button that connects them directly to their healthcare provider.
The Problem
Forgetting medication is dangerous. Around 50% of elderly patients don't take their medications as prescribed, and medication non-adherence is linked to over 125,000 deaths every year. Dementia patients struggle to remember what to take, when to take it, and whether they already have, and caregivers can't always be present. Patients need a system that works for them.
My Role
Developer and designer on the five-person team (with Ramya Yerramilli, Becky Berg, Rahul Nayanegali, and Jeffrey Lin). I worked on the patient-facing experience, from the initial wireframes through building the React Native prototype.
Development Process
We started from three design principles: radical simplification (high contrast, large text, one primary action per screen, no hidden menus), cognitive assistance (no animations, a permanent clock and orienting headers to reduce confusion), and safety & familiarity (a photo-based interface with curated content only). From there we wireframed the full journey, a nurse pre-configures the account, the patient receives a physical kit with a QR code, and scanning it sets the app up automatically, then built a working React Native prototype of the daily medication flow.
Key Features
- QR-code setup kit: a care provider scans a pre-loaded code and the account and medication schedule configure automatically
- Personalized greeting ('Welcome Sally!') with a permanent clock and date for orientation
- Clear medication prompts with a photo of each pill, what it's for, and expiration tracking
- One large checkbox to confirm a dose, every tap is logged with a timestamp, building an adherence history providers can review remotely
- One-tap 'Call for Help' button that connects directly to a healthcare professional
- Check-in prompts with large YES/NO buttons and a 'Thank you!' screen for reassurance
Challenges & Solutions
Designing for users with cognitive impairment, conventional app patterns like menus, gestures, and dense screens simply don't work.
Adopted radical simplification as a hard rule: one primary action per screen, large written-out labels, high contrast, no animations, and no hidden navigation. The interface leans on photos of the actual pills for visual recognition.
Account setup is far too complex to ask of the patient themselves.
Moved setup out of the app entirely: patients receive a physical kit with a QR code pre-loaded with their information, and their care provider scans it to link everything, the app arrives ready to use.
Caregivers needed adherence records without burdening anyone with manual logging.
Every checkbox tap is recorded with a timestamp in the background, so healthcare providers can review missed doses and patterns of concern remotely, no record-keeping asked of patients or caregivers.