Music for my Mind

Music for My Mind is an innovative charity aiming to improve the well-being of people living with dementia and their families through personalised music playlists.

Music for my Mind offer a unique service in helping to improve the well-being of people living with dementia by helping families and carers to generate bespoke, personalised playlists to ultimately act as an aid in improving the individuals quality of life. It’s been studied that music can help evoke memories and emotions associated with a particular song, and Music for my Mind hope that in having music sessions with the person affected will bring back treasured memories or clearer visions of the past. Here is what they have to say: “We all have soundtracks to our lives. We want to enable people affected by dementia to enjoy their life soundtrack through easy-to-access personalised music that improves their well-being and that of those closest to them.”

Music for my Mind are currently looking for volunteers to take part in a trial study.... Click here to register your interest

We searched widely for an app developer to assist us with our new charity and found a responsive, generous and empathic partner in DabApps.

Professor Keith McAdam, Founder of Music for my Mind

The challenge

Music for my mind were operating face to face sessions where they’d sit with the families/carers & individuals and guide them through a ‘music questionnaire’ that consisted of short snippets of music. They would manually record the individuals responses to particular songs and then review the results to compile a final playlist for the user.

This was a time consuming process and resulted in lots of paper work and administration to generate the final playlist! They needed our help in developing cost-effective technology that would enable families and carers to quickly and easily gain access to personalised playlists, wherever and whenever they needed.

Their mission: “Through research and technological development, to promote and enable the take up of personalised music to improve the well-being of people living with dementia, their relatives, friends and carers.”

How we solved the problem

We decided that the best way to achieve their goal, was to provide two platforms:

The Research WebApp
This would replace the heavy paperwork and manual playlist creation that the Music for my Mind team managed when offering face to face sessions. We would replace the paper forms with a speedy online platform, that would allow them to stream the playlist of tracks and enter reaction scores as they go. This would then automatically generate a final playlist that could then be shared with the families.

The User WebApp
The user app wouldn’t require any face to face sessions with the Music for my Mind team and instead, would allow families to self-serve from home and take the music survey themselves through use of our online tool. The user would be taken through the survey, answering questions as they go and then would be provided a final playlist that could automatically sync with their Spotify account for easy listening.

The outcome

The two tools have allowed the Music for my Mind team to reduce the amount of paperwork required in offering face to face sessions and, for the first time allowed people to take the survey from the comfort of their own homes. This will extend the global outreach of users that can benefit from the platform, and allows more and more families to enjoy the rewards of personalised musical playlists that should help to improve the quality of life for those suffering with dementia.

We have been privileged to work with Chris and the rest of the DabApps team. Not only have they responded on time, with good proposals and competitive pricing, but they have delivered imaginative solutions. We have valued Chris’s contribution to the strategic directions of the charity; his responses have been carefully thought through, and unselfish.

Professor Keith McAdam, Founder of Music for my Mind