A group of Bellevue students took a family member’s pain and have turned it into an award-winning musical therapy app.
Five Open Window School students won Best in Region at the Verizon Innovative App challenge this month with NeuroNote, an app that provides musical therapy for speech, movement and memory rehabilitation to people with neurological disorders.
After Ayush Noori’s grandmother was stricken with the relatively rare neurological disease Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, he joined forces with classmates Sage Khanuja, Lizzy Park, Keating Rowe and Seth Yager to try and create something that could have a positive impact, no matter how small.
“It’s very painful for me, I’m very close to my grandmother and it’s shaken me as a person. Since her diagnosis (in 2009), her quality of life has changed significantly.”
His teammates said that while they didn’t have much knowledge of neurological disorders before developing the app, they were amazed to find out just how many Americans are affected by the myriad of different ailments. They were even more surprised to realize that they could assist in some way.
“It seemed like it was someone that could only be treated by someone who had trained for it, like doctors. You wouldn’t think students like us could make a difference,” Park said.
Noori and Park had developed an app for the Youth Apps Challenge the year before, but overall, none of the team members had much experience with app development or programming.
Over 1,200 apps were submitted to the App challenge this year.
The team spent roughly 18 hours in total researching neurological conditions, existing technology and interviewing specialists over their Thanksgiving break before deciding on what type of application they wanted to create.
“These kids were not afraid to contact researchers or professionals. I was consistently impressed by how professional they were, I wonder if anyone knew they were talking to middle schoolers,” said Maria DiGiovanni, the school’s innovative technology assistant, who acted as a faculty advisor to the group.
In the end, the idea to work with music again came from Noori’s grandmother. The eighth grader had noticed that his grandmother was better able to articulate words when she sings, because that uses a different part of the brain than is affected by her disease.
Though the App Challenge does not require participants to actually create the technology, just develop and design an idea, the group is now seriously considering going the full mile and coding NeuroNote.
Their regional win garnered the attention of CurePSP, a national organization dedicated to fighting prime of life neurological diseases. The NeuroNote team was on point in their analysis of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy patients, as a critical aspect of therapy is engaging patients who are often left feeling apathetic and isolated due to their illness, CurePSP board member and Johns Hopkins University researcher Dr. Alexander Pantelyat said.
But the most important judge gave the team top marks.
“She was speechless, pretty much jumping with joy. I could imagine her with this big smile, which is really important to me because her palsy weakens her facial muscles, so now it’s hard for her to show facial expressions,” Noori said. “It was a really special moment.”
