Evaluating the Scenario

Presenting the first prototype of the app to the school administration and the Coding for Good club

Our first visits to the Apex Harmony Lodge - the retirement home for the elderly in Singapore engages in music therapy for the patients- were very insightful for the core motivation to adapt the features in the app such that they best serve the needs of the caregivers and student volunteers. These trips helped to finalise the foundation of Project Fuxi: growing our understanding beyond just solving the technical challenges of creating a useful tool, it became something deeper and more personal. Meeting with our clients, in person, for the first time we gained a heightened appreciation for the impact that we would have through our app. With a renewed resolve towards helping this initiative succeed and expand, we left the centre inspired.

Student volunteers with the patients at the Apex Harmony Lodge

Through these experiences, we curated a set of features that would best account for the variables that exist and how we can purpose-build a solution that would best suit these circumstances. These include a search feature for residents with specific song requests and add them to a database. Another such feature we changed was to give a continuous rating spectrum as opposed to fixed upvotes and downvotes on particular songs. This would allow students to classify interactions in a more nuanced and valuable fashion. We also realized that there is far more variance between students and patients with students often assigned residents based on the week-to-week availability of patients. As a result we changed our authentication scheme to match this situation by instead creating accounts for each patient as opposed to the caregivers, that could be used by any volunteer or staff member. 

Additionally, after having visited the center ourselves, we realized that the importance of the human connections formed between the students and the patients cannot be emulated or replaced by technology in a meaningful way. To that end, we have pivoted our long-term focus from delivering a tool that could help to automate and scale these patient experiences, for which there is often a shortage of volunteers, to instead creating a virtual assistant that could help volunteers and caregivers to facilitate the music therapy program and gain a greater understanding of their interactions with the patients.

We have started looking into creating records of interactions between student and patient to enable data-analysis on a macro scale; comparing patient-to-patient data to gain further knowledge and inform future song recommendations and insights into patients' well being. This will allow the staff at the retirement home to remain organised in their therapy sessions and gauge the success of their program. 

It has been a long journey to come to this point and we are grateful for the opportunity to be able to contribute towards making an impact in a meaningful way.