For people living with early memory loss, recalling and sharing life stories can be a powerful act. It’s the idea behind “reminiscence therapy,” an approach for treating dementia that uses personal memories to boost mood, cognition, and connection.
Now, George Mason University Nursing Professor Kyeung Mi Oh is working to make that therapy more accessible for diverse communities. She’s serving as co-principal investigator on a new $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to refine the LifeBio Memory app , an artificial-intelligence platform that helps older adults capture their memories and share them with caregivers.
Earlier versions of the LifeBio Memory app have reached nursing homes and assisted-living facilities nationwide, with residents showing greater engagement and fewer symptoms of depression. The new phase brings the app into community settings—with older adults living at home with a caregiver—and expands to multiple languages and cultural contexts, including English, Spanish, and Korean.
A nurse scientist with expertise in gerontology, Oh leads the project’s community-based research arm. “We want to see how storytelling technology can improve quality of life and relationships for both the older adult and the caregiver,” she said. “When people talk about their past, they often smile. It strengthens social support and emotional closeness.”
Over the next three years, Oh’s team—including co-principal investigator Lisbeth Sanders, founder and CEO of LifeBio Inc.—will conduct usability testing followed by a randomized controlled trial with 84 caregiver–care recipient pairs.
While LifeBio’s engineers refine the app’s AI features, such as automatically generating digital life-story books and multimedia “memory videos,” Oh is studying what happens when people use it. The research will examine psychosocial outcomes such as loneliness, depression, and relationship quality, alongside overall quality of life.
“We’re working to make LifeBio Memory accessible for people of different languages and cultural backgrounds, so older adults can tell their life stories in their own voices,” Oh said. “By adapting the platform with AI to reflect cultural nuances, we hope to help a wide range of adults with early memory loss stay connected to family and caregivers, improve their quality of life, and ease feelings of loneliness or depression that can speed cognitive decline.”
If the project is successful, researchers say it could offer a widely scalable, affordable tool for dementia support that’s available for people to use in their own homes and in their own languages.