"NoteClock" free app for cognitive/vision impairment

Hi - I still don’t quite have my first actual game done, but I do have an app to share: a specialized clock I made for my grandmother who had memory and vision problems. I think it might help other people, so I’m offering it free here:

http://adamsimmersive.com/#noteclock

These are the problems it solved for my grandmother:

1. Poor eyesight. You can buy big digital clocks, but they’re usually red or LCD/gray, and have those squared-off “7-segment” digits that she found difficult to read clearly. NoteClock uses real print-style numbers, in bright white and yellow on black.

2. Forgetting the date (including the year) and the day of the week. NoteClock shows these big, without abbreviations.

3. Being confused about the time of day, especially after waking from a nap. A clock’s tiny AM/PM indicator wasn’t helpful. She would confuse morning with evening, which she found stressful and embarrasing. NoteClock shows the time of day in natural language, like “late morning.”

4. NoteClock also allows a big, bright note to be left by a caregiver or family member. It appears below the time. For example: “Pills are now in top drawer.” or “Morgan is visiting Friday.” This hidden feature is unlikely to be triggered accidentally: you triple-tap the AM/PM.



This is a web app (only tested on iOS but hopefully works on Android, Windows Phone etc.) but it does run fullscreen (no browser controls) and it does run without an Internet connection as long as you install it on your home screen as instructed.

The idea is to convert an old iOS device (even one with a bad battery) to a permanently plugged-in clock. A really big one, in the case of an iPad! Using iOS’s Guided Access feature, the Home button can be locked so nobody can (accidentally) hide the clock or mess with other apps. My grandmother didn’t know it was an iPhone in a rubber case; she just knew it was a new clock that solved a few little problems for her.

It’s still a beta for now, but has worked well for a long time for my family.

Two future features I have in mind:

1) Special messages that appear on holidays—including custom dates like birthdays. (Actually, I’ve done this already—but I disabled it for being too US-specific. It needs a Settings screen of some kind.)

2) Localization (automatically obeying system setting) to show the phrases in other languages. Any volunteers? I can send you a list of the phrases.

Ideas/suggestions/bug reports are welcome! It’s a side project, but one I’d like to see be useful to people!

 

Thanks.

I also made an app for her to do art: she was a painter, but became incapable of seeing a canvas clearly when it was close enough to reach.

So I made a special paint program, friendly for someone with longstanding traditional paint habits but no tech experience. I ran it on an old PowerBook, hidden in a cupboard and hooked up to her TV. A Wacom tablet with a long cord let her sit way back, and do her art on the big TV screen. "Art" was essentially just one of the channels on her TV, and the PowerBook ran just that one app, 24/7, sleeping and waking automatically.

The tricky part was file management: she couldn't get her head around it. So I ended up making the app be a "sketchbook"--she could flip through the pages to review past art, or flip to a blank page at the end and start a new piece. Everything saved automatically (seems obvious now, but it wasn't back then before iOS) so it acted just like a paper sketchbook, and let her keep painting long after her eyes started to go.

(The other tricky part was getting her to remember that the point of the stylus was for drawing, and the eraser end brought up the "tools." She'd get the ends confused by sight alone. So I knotted a rubber band around the eraser end to make it feel different.)

But I probably won't release that app unless I rebuild it. It was specifically for PowerPC.