Strokes are one of the major leading preventable causes in adult disability. Occurring when blood flow is cut off to an area of the brain, stroke causes brain cells to die due to oxygen deprivation. Brain damage from strokes can ultimately lead to impaired motor functionalities, sensory disturbances, impaired cognitive function, and emotional disturbances. The only way to achieve recovery is through completion and ongoing lifelong rehabilitation. Rehabilitation allows patients to rebuild their quality of life, maximize their motor functions, and rebuild their cognitive networks. Due to rising medical cost of in-person treatment and limited time constraints of clinicians, consistent face to face treatment is not always accessible to all patients.

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Team 172 developed a cognitive-based crossword puzzle rehabilitation app targeted for mobile platforms - i.e iOS and Android. The design was simply a crossword puzzle that utilized visual/auditory aids along with contextual cues to help patients develop associations of words with real-world events. These contextual cues were implemented as crossword themes that patients could choose within the app. Every word that would appear in the their crossword puzzle would be associated with the theme they had chosen. Each word to be solved would be represented as an example sentence showing the usage of the word like a normal crossword would. The way visual cues were implemented would be through pictures that further developed the context of the hidden word, in addition to text-to-speech as an auditory aid. The combination of these different methods were intended to encourage rehabilitation by activating different parts of the patient’s brain.