DORY : Games that double as a memory checkup

DORY is a companion app for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's. Every day it runs a short set of memory games tuned to that person's own life and culture, then turns their answers into a report a caretaker can actually read: which brain region the day's games leaned on, how accuracy trended over the week, and where to focus next.

Most cognitive exercises for dementia patients are generic: the same word puzzle, the same trivia deck, regardless of who's playing. A card game that means nothing to someone who never played it, or a song prompt in a language they don't speak, tests confusion more than memory.

And even where good exercises exist, the person running them, usually a family member or an overstretched caretaker, rarely gets more than a subjective "she seemed okay today" to go on.

DORY's games are built around one idea: recall works best when the material already means something to the player. A French patient gets Belote, not solitaire. Someone who grew up on 60s pop gets a lyric game drawn from that decade rather than a modern playlist they've never heard.

The bet is that a game built from a patient's own history measures how well they remember. A generic one mostly measures how unfamiliar the exercise is.

Lyric completion plays a song the patient would recognize and asks them to finish the next line, testing long-term musical and verbal memory.

A reminiscence prompt shows an old photo or video clip and asks what it reminds them of, encouraging autobiographical recall instead of a right-or-wrong answer.

Belote, a French trick-taking card game, tests working memory and quick decision-making by asking the patient to judge which of two cards is higher, played entirely in their own language.

Every answered question feeds a caretaker report. A brain-surface heat map shows which regions the day's games leaned on, shaded from least to most active. Daily bars break each session into correct, skipped, and wrong answers, a five-week trend line tracks overall accuracy, and a calendar marks which days the patient played.

None of this replaces a doctor. It replaces "how's mom doing today" with an answer you can point to.

DORY has taken shape across a few codebases: a Next.js and PostgreSQL web app for the caretaker dashboard and reporting, and a native iPad build (Ionic React and Capacitor, with a Prisma-backed data layer) for the patient-facing games themselves, since a shared iPad on a nightstand is a far more realistic place for this to live than a browser tab.

Cultural adaptation is the hard part. Sourcing music, photos, and card games that match one person's background doesn't scale the way a generic trivia deck does, and right now that content gets picked by hand for each patient.

Automating it, starting from a patient's own listening history or family photos, is the next problem worth solving here.