MindMaze
Goals
After all the research kept returning to the same three problems.
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Make the practice worth returning to:
Repetition is what makes cognitive exercise effective, and it's also why people abandon it. Keep the clinical structure; rebuild everything around it.
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Give people a starting point:
Replace the blank page with a daily path.
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Open a door for the family and loved ones:
Turn the desire to help into something concrete: memories, photos, and voice messages that build into a shared album.
Brainstorming
After analyzing the details and understanding the target audience's pain points, I began a thorough brainstorming process. This phase allowed me to explore creative solutions and generate ideas for features that address the unique challenges and needs of the users. By focusing on what matters most to the audience, I developed a list of possible features that could be incorporated into Mindmaze to enhance its functionality and user experience. This approach ensured that every feature was purposeful, relevant, and aligned with the app’s mission.
Features
Mini Games
The games are built on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, so the underlying exercises are the same ones clinicians use. What changed is the wrapping. Cognitive practice only works through repetition, and repetition is exactly what makes people stop, so the drills became games that score memory and attention as you play, and the daily session stopped feeling like a test.
CalmZone
Fear came up in the research as often as forgetting did. Not knowing how fast things will change or what comes next produces real anxiety, and anxiety makes cognition worse. CalmZone offers guided breathing and short meditations for moments when worry is the problem, not the memory.
Journaling
A place to write down the day, which does two things at once. It creates a record you can return to, and the act of writing it forces the recall. Sitting down each evening and reconstructing where you went and whom you spoke to is itself an exercise.
BrainBoost
Cognitive health is not only a screen activity. BrainBoost is where you set a goal outside the app, learn something new, take a class, get out of the house, and track it. It came out of a finding that ran through everything: people need a sense of progress and accomplishment, not just a score.
MemoryLane
The one feature built for someone other than the user. Family and friends can send photos, voice notes, videos, and written memories, and those are collected into an album you can go through whenever you want. Research kept showing two things: that people value family involvement, and that photos and recorded voices are among the strongest supports for recall. MemoryLane gives people who want to help something concrete to do.
Promo Video
User Interface
