Melio

Our project :)
Melio, use cases
Dedicated to our moms ❤️

Inspiration

One of our team member's grandmother has dementia. The hardest part wasn't the memory loss and it was watching her lose the rhythm of her own day. She couldn't feel where she was in time. But music still reached her. A song from her past could bring her back into the room in a way nothing else could. That observation led us to the research. Musical pathways in the brain are uniquely preserved in dementia, often remaining intact long after language and recall decline. A two-year NYC Health + Hospitals study of 108 memory care residents found that a Music & Memory program led to fewer falls and physical altercations and real clinical outcomes from something as human as a familiar song. But existing products weren't asking why music helped, or whether that effect could be made deliberate. The answer led us to temporal perception: the felt sense of duration and sequence that the brain generates through the same circuits music activates.

What it does

Melio is a wearable-connected app that helps caregivers support dementia patients through rhythm-guided exercises and adaptive music therapy. It passively monitors how well a patient moves in sync with music, tracks changes in temporal perception throughout the day, and guides them through rhythm-based exercises to reinforce coordination. When unusual patterns are detected, Melio alerts the caregiver and logs the data into reports for physicians to review. It also responds in the moment and uses generative AI and human revision to recommend familiar songs at adjusted tempos to help restore a comfortable rhythm and provide emotional comfort.

How we built it

We built this prototype in Figma, using After Effects for animations and Blender to bring the physical product to life in 3D.

Challenges we ran into

Visualizing the information was its own design problem. We could have simply displayed data but we wanted the app to emphasize the experience of tracking a sense, instead of just reporting on it. Translating something as subtle as temporal perception into something a caregiver could feel and act on, rather than just read, pushed us to think differently about every screen. Figma's prototyping limitations also meant moving into After Effects to create the musical animations, where the team learned to use markers to manage and sync them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We carried visual motifs throughout the product and built a temporal perception scale to make an invisible sense visible. On the craft side, we pushed ourselves to present information in a way that felt as considered as the concept itself. Beyond using Figma, we worked on Blender to visualize the physical product and After Effects to bring the music interactions to life. Making something speculative feel credible turned out to require as much design craft as the research behind it.

What we learned

We learned how to design a product built to genuinely last and benefit the user, pushing the boundaries of what music applications can do by grounding every decision in the scientific research behind music's effect on dementia patients, to serve a population that is too often overlooked.

What's next for Melio

Moving forward, Melio aims to expand beyond a concept into a validated tool that supports both individuals with early-stage dementia and their caregivers.