Problem Statements

How might we use technology as a bridge that connects our Grandparents and Grandchildren and as a tool to empower generations to share stories, laughter, and wisdom in ways never before possible.

Intergenerational disconnect contributes to social isolation and reinforces ageist attitudes. The problem is significant due to its impact on mental health, emotional well-being, and family cohesion.

Data shows: 57% of grandparents who see their grandkids only every few months report feeling lonely, compared to 70% of those who see them even less often.

Loss of this relationship leads to negative effects, including increased depression and a weakened sense of family identity. In addition, the Straits Times has reported that nearly half of Singaporean youth between the ages of 15 and 21 have ‘problematic smartphone use’. This adds another barrier to forming meaningful intergenerational connections within the family.

Family Link, is the team's effort to Bridge the Years, and Share the Cheers!

Experienced as an interactive online experience, and modelled after a Monopoly-style board game, users roll a virtual dice at weekly or daily intervals to move along the board.

Each tile represents a unique activity to complete by the end of the week — such as a road trip, hiking adventure, cooking or baking challenge, family reunion, or picnic. These tasks encourage bonding, exploration, and creativity between the grandparents and the grandchildren.

The app will have age-specific personalisations for an engaging user experience. Exciting challenges with tiered difficulty are designed into the map interface, where family members can move their characters to interact with one another.

The students’ hope is to harness the generative quality of artificial intelligence to broaden the range of challenges available to families, as well as to maintain regular and consistent updates for challenges to all. Lastly, Family Link challenges can be completed to earn points, which scale to the difficulty of the task.

With support from more companies, they hope to incentivise the app usage through vouchers and discount opportunities too. They are optimistic that Family Link will help to foster family unity, and strengthen bonds between grandparents and grandchildren.

This project was inspired by the sense of distance and loneliness that one of the team member’s faces because of the physical separation between his grandparents in Korea and himself.

Realising that the distance had grown into an emotional gap, due to the limited number of opportunities to meet, the team conducted user research with other young people to find out about their relationships with their grandparents. They discovered that there is often a disconnect that grandparents and their grandchildren would like to address, and so the team began considering designing a platform to strengthen intergenerational bonds and create meaningful connections despite physical distance in ways that messaging services could not.