Three Nigerian Teens Win International Technology Competition for Creating” Memory Haven”- An App to Help Patients with Dementia

Three Nigerian Teens Win International Technology Competition for Creating” Memory Haven”- An App to Help Patients with Dementia

Passionate about using technology to solve people’s problems, three Nigerian-Irish teenagers, Rachael Akano (16), Margaret Akano (17) and Joy Njekwe (17), have been named champions of Technovation Girls, an international competition which challenges young women to develop a problem solving app for their community.

Technovation is a global tech education nonprofit that empowers girls and families to become leaders, creators, and problem-solvers. The International organization offers two programs – Technovation Girls and Technovation Families – which bring kids and adults together to solve big problems in their communities.

Technovation Girls is an annual event hosted by Technovation which empowers girls between 10 and 18years to become tech entrepreneurs and leaders with the support of volunteer mentors, girls work in teams to code mobile apps that address real-world problems.

After participating in a 12-week long challenge beating out nearly 2,000 entries from 60 countries at the Technovation World Summit and guided by data scientist Evelyn Nomayo, an Afro-Irish developer and the founder of Phase Innovate, an organization that trains and mentors underrepresented minorities and women in tech, the three girls who live in Drogheda, Ireland created the phone app ”memory haven” to help patients with dementia. Memory haven helps dementia patients identify loved ones by showing them photos and plays them uplifting songs if facial recognition senses a change in mood.

Evelyn Nomayo, the girls’ mentor was the one who inspired the teens’ app “memory haven”, after telling the girls about her mother, who experienced dementia, the young girls were inspired to create an app that could help with the disorder.

In an interview with NPR National Public Radio, Nomayo explained that she wished to mentor the team because she has experienced isolation herself. “I’m currently doing a Ph.D. (computer science and statistics),” she said. “During this process, I found that most of the time, I was either the only girl in class or the only black person or person of color. Whether I’m working or being educated, it’s so obvious that there’s a shortage of women in this space. So I just felt it: There was a need to bring more girls and people of color into that space.”

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Speaking of their future plans, the memory haven app inventors, Rachael Akano hopes to go into international business and IT; Margaret Akano is currently in medical school; and Njekwe is a senior in high school and getting ready for college, where she plans to major in computer science and engineering.

Memory Haven has a half-dozen features targeting memory loss and speech and recognition problems – all of which are key issues faced by people with dementia. Memory Haven is coming to app stores this month