CareAhead

Inspiration

For millions of people, checkups aren't something you schedule, but something you delay. Individuals worldwide who live in lower income or remote areas face barriers in accessing healthcare. The most common barriers are cost and distance. This makes routine checkups and symptom monitoring very difficult.

With clinics that are hours away and check ups that can exceed $600 USD in cost, it's no surprise that many go a long time without visiting their doctor. Small warnings are ignored and issues gradually build up until symptoms become severe. This not only worsens one's chance at recovery, but adds strain to the world's already strained healthcare systems. Our solution provides basic preventative care and aims to help people understand and monitor their health early on before a crisis occurs.

What it does

The user does a daily health check with Presage using their phone camera. The user's key vitals, such as heart rate and breathing are taken (blood pressure can also be taken but is a relatively new feature). The user logs any other symptoms they have, which add context to the measurements. The data is stored in the user's device to build a personal health history. Their health history is then given to Gemini to analyze. Gemini will look out for trends and patterns, translating them into insights and suggestions, which will change each day and greet the user each morning. The user also has the option to access the health data of their family members, allowing loved ones to look after each other.

We would like to make clear that CareAhead is not a replacement for a medical professional, but rather a basic way to monitor health

How we built it

We had Michael work on the backend initially, where he was tasked with integrating Presage. He defined a schema for incoming health metrics, validated user inputs, and mapped those values to Presage’s expected request format. The rest of the team worked on Figma mockups that served as the build's blueprint. Much attention was put on aesthetics and accessibility in the design. We wanted to ensure that our app was as intuitive as possible, especially since it was a healthcare app that was going to be used by everyone. After creating the codebase, we implemented the mockups in Swift. MapKit was imported to the mapView file to show nearby clinics and hospitals, giving users context on where care is available and how far it is.

Challenges we ran into

At about 9 PM we found that React was not compatible with our project. This led to a last minute switch to Swift and a night of no sleep.
None of us had worked with Swift before, so we spent a lot of time understanding the syntax and reading documentation
It was difficult to coordinate our ideas on Figma. We all had our own suggestions on how to make the app visually appealing and reflective of its health theme. In the end, we settled for a simple and relaxing colour scheme.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re most proud of how much we learned and adapted over the course of the hackathon. A large portion of the project was built using tools and languages that none of us had prior experience with, including the Presage API, the Gemini API, and Swift. Despite this, we were able to design and implement a complete user workflow within a very short timeframe. We’re also proud that the final product matched our original goal of being simple, accessible, and practical for real users.

What we learned

Good UX is essential for apps that involve any sort of daily tracking. The UX workshops were very informative in designing an app that users would have an easy time navigating and interacting with. We had a lot of fun making sure that people would actually want to come back to the app. We also learned the importance of having mockups as a starting point. Seeing how we referred to them so much in the beginning, it's evident that a good design is a good foundation.

What's next for CareAhead

An initial plan we had was connecting the information the app had collected to healthcare professionals. A notable end goal would be to establish CareAhead as a complement to existing healthcare systems. Moreover, we'd have to conduct user testing to check how well the app is designed, as well as its effectiveness in getting users to monitor their health and visit the doctor when necessary. Moreover, we could increase the accessibility of the application by incorporating ElevenLabs in giving instructions.

Another implementation we are considering is implementing guided exercises for users such as breathing exercises. These exercises could be done in coordination with Presage to monitor breathing and heart rate as well as ElevenLabs to provide a guided experience.