🇮🇪 Margaret Akano

What Memory Haven does

The app was designed to help the more than 500,000 people in Ireland whose families are affected by dementia. Its core feature is musical: playlists built on research showing that musical memories remain relatively intact in dementia patients even as other recall fails.

Around that sit practical tools. Memory Haven includes healthcare features and alerts, face and voice recognition, and health checks for both patients and their carers — an acknowledgement that dementia is a condition that exhausts two people at once.

The competition they won

Technovation ran its 2020 season with 5,400 students from 62 countries, who between them produced more than 1,500 apps. Memory Haven was entered in the senior girls' division and won the global grand prize.

Their team was the only one from the European Union to qualify for the senior division, and in the final round they faced four other international finalists. The article reporting the win does not state the prize money.

Technovation is structured as a season rather than a weekend: teams identify a problem in their own community, build a working mobile application, prepare a business case for it, and submit a pitch. Judging weighs the idea, the code and the plan together, which is why the winning entries tend to be built around a problem the team has actually seen.

Built apart

The app was developed remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the team unable to work in the same room for much of the process. One member still described it as "one of the most fun experiences we've ever had."

The project had a personal thread as well. Their mentor, Evelyn Nomayo, had lost her grandmother to dementia earlier that year, and that loss is cited as part of the motivation behind the app's subject.

Remote development also changes what a team can attempt. Without a shared workspace, the work has to be split into pieces that can be written separately and merged, and the coordination overhead lands on teenagers who were also sitting out a school year disrupted by closures. That the app arrived complete enough to win a global final says something about the discipline behind it.

Why music, and why it works

The choice of music is not sentimental. The research the team drew on holds that musical memory is comparatively resilient in dementia, which is why a familiar song can reach someone who no longer recognises a room or a face.

That makes a playlist a clinical instrument of a modest kind, and it makes an app a reasonable delivery mechanism: the songs a person grew up with are individual, and assembling them is exactly the sort of task software handles well. The team paired that with recognition features intended to help a user identify the people around them.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the win, the division, the date, the three team members and their ages, the app's features and purpose, and the scale of the competition.

Open: the team's school and town are not named in the source used here, nor is the prize money, nor whether Memory Haven was released publicly or taken further. No reporting on Margaret Akano after August 2020 appears in the sources gathered for this page.

There is a wider point in the result. An all-female Irish team of teenagers took the senior title in a global field of thousands, with an app addressing a condition that is usually discussed by health services rather than by software developers. Competitions of this kind exist to make exactly that outcome possible, and in 2020 it happened.