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 offers a fantastic, one-of-a-kind service to help improve the well-being of people living with dementia by helping families and caregivers in generating bespoke, personalised playlists to act as an aid in improving the individuals quality of life.  Music has been shown to evoke memories and emotions associated with a specific song, and Music for my Mind hopes that having music sessions with the person affected will bring back treasured memories or clearer visions of the past. This is what they have to say:

The challenge

Music for My Mind was operating face to face sessions in which they sat with the families/carers and individuals and guided them through a ‘music questionnaire’ made up of short snippets of music. They would manually record the individual's responses to particular songs and then review the results to compile a unique final playlist for the user.

The final playlist was the result of a process that included a lot of hard work as much paperwork and administration was involved. They needed our expertise in developing cost-effective technology that would allow families and caregivers to quickly and easily gain access to personalised playlists, wherever and whenever they needed it.

Their mission is as follows: “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

Our idea for this app was for it to take the place of the extensive paperwork and manual playlist creation that the Music for My Mind team was responsible for when offering crucial face to face sessions. We would replace the paper forms with a quick online platform that would allow them to stream the playlist of tracks while entering reaction scores according to the response of the individual. This would then automatically generate a final playlist which could then be shared with their loved ones.

The User WebApp

The intention for the user app was that it wouldn’t require any face to face sessions with the Music for My Mind team, but would instead allow those that care about them to self-serve from home and take the music survey themselves using the online tool we created. The user would be carefully guided through the survey, answering questions along the way, and then would be given a final playlist that could automatically sync with their Spotify account for the user to easily listen to.

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 ever, allowed people to take the survey from the comfort of their own homes. Consequently, we have seen that this has broadened the global outreach of users that can benefit from the platform, allowing more families to reap the rewards of personalised musical playlists that should help to improve the quality of life for those they care about that suffer with dementia.