Coder, entrepreneur and teenager Emma Yang launches $50k Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for app to help improve Alzheimer’s patients’ daily lives

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A 14-Year-Old Made An App To Help Alzheimer’s Patients Rec­og­nize Their Loved Ones (Fast Company):

“When Emma Yang was 7 or 8 years old, her grand­moth­er became increas­ing­ly for­get­ful. Over the next few years, those mem­o­ry prob­lems, caused by ear­ly Alzheimer’s dis­ease, wors­ened. Yang, who learned to code at an ear­ly age, decid­ed to cre­ate an app to help…

In her app under devel­op­ment, called Time­less, Alzheimer’s patients can scroll through pho­tos of friends and fam­i­ly, and the app will tell them who the per­son is and how they’re relat­ed to the patient using facial recog­ni­tion tech. If a patient doesn’t rec­og­nize some­one in the same room, they can take a pic­ture and the tech will also try to auto­mat­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy them…

The app is still in devel­op­ment, and Yang doesn’t yet have proof that it will work. In a crowd­fund­ing cam­paign, she’s rais­ing mon­ey to take the next step of pilot­ing it with patients. But she is opti­mistic that it can help, espe­cial­ly if intro­duced to some­one in the ear­ly stages of the disease.

“There are no apps on the mar­ket that real­ly help Alzheimer’s patients with their dai­ly lives,” she says. “A lot of times peo­ple think that it’s not going to help, or the elder­ly can’t real­ly use tech­nol­o­gy, but in fact, if you strate­gi­cal­ly intro­duce it to them, it’s actu­al­ly a pos­si­bil­i­ty and can real­ly ben­e­fit their lives.”

The Crowdfunding Campaign

Time­less — A Mobile App for Alzheimer’s Patients, at IndieGogo:

  • Overview: Have you seen the movie “Alice”? Have you ever expe­ri­enced the dif­fi­cul­ties Alzheimer’s patients face as a result of mem­o­ry loss? Time­less is a first-of-its-kind, sim­ple, care­giv­er-assist­ed, easy to use mobile app for Alzheimer’s patients to remem­ber events, stay engaged & con­nect­ed with friends and fam­i­ly, and to rec­og­nize peo­ple through AI-based facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Time­less helps with all the dif­fer­ent aspects of Alzheimer’s patients’ lives in a sin­gle tool and empow­ers them to live bet­ter dai­ly lives!

The App in Context