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 inside families everywhere, usually with no professional caregiver around to help — just family members figuring it out as they go.
That's the problem my team, Team Yaadein, set out to tackle at HackBIOS 2026. We built Yaadein ("memories" in Hindi) — a memory-companion web app for elderly people living with early memory loss, built around something no generic memory app uses: the person's own family photos.
Instead of random stock images and a flat "Wrong!" when you miss an answer, Yaadein is built on gentle, personalized practice:
- A Family Photo Quiz — "who is this?" — using real uploaded family photos
- A Memory Match card game, same photos, turned into a light, encouraging challenge
- Gentle feedback everywhere — we never say "Wrong," we say "Let's try again"
- A Family Dashboard so relatives can quietly track progress without hovering
Our goal wasn't to build something flashy or "tech-savvy." It was to build something an elderly person with memory loss could actually sit down and use on their own — which shaped everything from button size to how errors are worded.
Demo
The prototype includes secure login, family member/photo management, the Photo Quiz, Memory Match, a walking reminder, and the Family Dashboard — all built and working by the end of the 24 hours.
Partner Technologies
Built with Python and Streamlit for the frontend/app logic, with SQLite for data storage (user accounts with salted, hashed passwords; family member and photo records). Photos are stored locally and referenced by path in the database. Everything was built from scratch during the hackathon — no pre-existing template or boilerplate.
Hackathon Experience
HackBIOS 2026 was my first hackathon ever — I hadn't done one in the two years before this, and I went in honestly expecting to be in over my head. Instead, my team spent 24 hours going from a rough idea to a fully working app, which taught me more in one day than I expected: splitting work for staged commits, debugging weird font/emoji rendering issues at 2am, redesigning the UI from scratch because the first version didn't actually work for the people it was meant for.
The most honest moment of the whole event: a judge walked up, asked "do you think old people will actually be able to play this?" — and walked away before I could answer. In the moment it stung. In hindsight, it was actually a great question, and one I made sure Yaadein could answer properly afterward (larger tap targets, simpler one-touch interactions, no harsh errors).
We didn't win, but Team Yaadein walked away with a Certificate of Appreciation — and honestly, what I'm most proud of isn't the certificate, it's how much I learned in such a short amount of time.
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