Playlist for Life

We all have a soundtrack to our life. The Playlist for Life app helps you find and listen to yours – and teaches you how to use it if you develop memory problems.

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WHAT ITS FOR

Two decades of research shows that music can help people living with dementia. It can:

- reduce anxiety and distress
- reduce the need for drugs
- help reconnect with loved ones and carers.

The most powerful music is music that has strong personal memories and emotions associated with it. We call that personally-meaningful music. It might include lullabies your parents sang to you, the music you danced to at your wedding, or songs you sang on the football terraces.

Your playlist for life is as unique as you are.

The Playlist for Life app is designed to make the experience of searching for personally-meaningful music and creating a playlist simple, fun and engaging.

The app has been designed with the help of people with dementia, their loved ones and carers to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Playlist for Life is a UK charity. We want everyone living with dementia to have access to a playlist of personally-meaningful music because it can make them feel better.

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HOW IT WORKS

The app will introduce you to The Music Detective, your friendly guide to tracking down the music of your life. You can use a variety of approaches to find your music:

- ‘Quick Search’ if you know what tune or singer or band you’re looking for, so you can find it quickly and easily.
- Browse 100+ playlists made by specialist Music Detectives. These include film and TV music and the top tunes of every year of the past 100 years.
- A reminiscence tool to inspire you about different areas of your life to search for music in.

The app stores all your special tunes in your unique Playlist for Life so you can listen whenever and wherever you want using the user-friendly control panel.

And once you have your Playlist for Life, the app’s unique Organiser gives you the option of adding labels to individual tunes. The labels help you remember:

- what the song reminds you of
- how it makes you feel
- what you like doing while listening to it.

From these Labels the Organiser will automatically build different playlists for different occasions. For example, your Happy playlist, your Childhood playlist, your playlist for Exercising. You can listen to all of these through the app.

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WHAT YOU NEED

The app runs on iPhones and iPads.

It uses Spotify as its music library. Spotify contains over 30 million songs so the chances are that it will contain your special music. You will need a Spotify Premium account in order to use the Playlist for Life app.

You will also need a connection to the internet, either through a phone network or through a broadband wi-fi connection.

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THANKS TO

The Utley Foundation for funding the creation of this public app, building on the generosity of the Gordon and Ena Baxter Foundation.

Edinburgh and Lothians Health Foundation, Alzheimer’s Scotland and GCU for their support to build the original research prototype for Nesta’s Dementia Citizen’s platform.

James Godwin and the rest of the team at Ctrl-Group.

All the people living with memory problems and their carers who helped develop this app.