Smart Phone Based Facial and Text Recognition Application (RICO)

In our everyday lives, more people are being diagnosed with assorted types of diseases; both mentally and physically. One of them being a life changing mental disease called Alzheimer. Within time and as people grow in age, more and more people are being diagnosed with that disease. Alzheimer disease is a type of disorder that affects the mental functions of the brain resulting in memory loss, which causes its patients to suffer from difficulty in recognizing faces they are familiar with. Moreover, patients tend to have problems interacting with the people surrounding them. Since there is no certain cure for this dementia, one of the ways we could contribute to help patients get along with this disease is by proposing a smart phone based facial and text recognition application (RICO). Rico does not aim to only help Alzheimer patients but can also help people with weak eyesight by recognizing and reading text. Rico has the ability to help early stage Alzheimer's patients identify people they interact with on daily basis. Rico is an application uses smart phone's camera to recognize faces, and then notify the patient. The application displays a brief description regarding the person's relation with the patient. The database contains familiar faces that the user most likely will interact with. Rico's goal is to ease the patient's life and let him/her adapt with the atmosphere without letting feeling excluded.