Yaadein: Building a Memory Companion for Families, in 24 Hours
This is a submission for the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge What I Built Imagine waking up one morning and your grandmother doesn't recognize you — not your face, not your name, not even the fact that you're her grandchild. It's disorienting for you, but imagine how much more disorienting it is for her. That's not a rare scenario. It's one of the quietest, most common realities of aging, playing out…
This story details the creation of Yaadein, a memory companion web app aimed at aiding families and elderly individuals dealing with early memory loss. The app was developed over a 24-hour period at HackBIOS 2026 by a team called Team Yaadein. The primary goal was to design a gentle, personalized experience using family photos rather than generic stock images.
The app includes a Family Photo Quiz, a Memory Match card game, gentle feedback, and a Family Dashboard for relatives to track progress. The prototype features secure login, family member/photo management, and was built using Python, Streamlit, and SQLite. The team emphasized creating an app that could be used independently by elderly users, focusing on button size, error messaging, and overall user experience.
Despite not winning the competition, the team walked away with a Certificate of Appreciation and valuable lessons learned about teamwork, debugging, and adapting to user needs in a short time frame.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
