🇮🇪 Rachael Akano

The app

Memory Haven was built for the more than 500,000 people in Ireland whose families are affected by dementia. Its defining feature is a set of music playlists, chosen on the basis of research indicating that musical memories remain relatively intact in dementia patients long after other recall has faded.

The rest of the app is practical support: healthcare features and alerts, face and voice recognition to help a user place the people around them, and health checks covering both the patient and the carer.

Winning the senior division at 15

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

Rachael was the youngest of the three. Her team was the only one from the European Union to reach the senior division, and it competed against four other international finalists in the final round. The prize money is not stated in the report used here.

Technovation runs as a season rather than a single event. Teams choose a problem in their own community, build a working mobile application, write a business case and deliver a pitch, and the judging weighs all three together. An app that solves a real local problem therefore scores better than a technically elegant one with no user in mind.

Built in lockdown

The app was developed remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the team members separated for much of the work. One of them nonetheless called it "one of the most fun experiences we've ever had."

Their mentor, Evelyn Nomayo, had lost her grandmother to dementia earlier that year, and that bereavement is given as part of the reason the team chose the subject. It is an unusually direct line between a private loss and a piece of software.

Two sisters, one project

Margaret and Rachael Akano built the app together with Njekwe, which places two siblings on the same winning team — a pattern that recurs in school technology competitions, where a shared household is also a shared workshop.

The reporting treats all three as equal members of the team rather than assigning individual components, so no source here says which parts of Memory Haven each of them wrote. That distinction is left as it was published.

Dementia is also an unusually demanding subject for a first serious piece of software. The users are people whose memory is failing and the carers beside them, which rules out the conventions most apps rely on — remembered passwords, learned menus, small text, multi-step flows. Designing for that audience is a harder brief than the age of the team suggests.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the global grand prize in the senior division, the date, her age, her teammates and their ages, the app's features and its purpose, and the size of the competition.

Open: the team's school and town, the prize money, whether Memory Haven was publicly released, and what Rachael Akano has done since August 2020. The sources gathered for this page do not answer any of those, and this page does not fill them in.

What the record does establish is the shape of the achievement: three teenagers from Ireland, working apart during a pandemic, produced software good enough to win the senior division of a competition spanning 62 countries. That is the documented fact, and it needs no embellishment.