Cardia

Cardia is an easy-to-use maternal heart health app that gives pregnant and postpartum women personalized education and self-advocacy tools to support their heart health throughout life.

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Cardia

Overview

Heart disease is a major maternal health concern, but many warning signs during pregnancy and postpartum are overlooked or dismissed.

Symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, severe fatigue, swelling, high blood pressure, or severe headaches may seem separate, but together they can point to a larger cardiovascular issue.

Many users also do not realize that pregnancy complications can affect heart health beyond pregnancy and postpartum.

Problem

Pregnancy and postpartum health can reveal important signs about a person’s long-term heart health. Conditions such as preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, chest pain, swelling, and abnormal heart symptoms may increase future cardiovascular risk.

Cardia helps users understand these connections through clear education, personalized recommendations, advocacy support, and community-centered resources.

Our goal is to make heart health information during pregnancy and postpartum as simple, accessible, and actionable as possible.

Solution

Cardia focuses on three main ideas:

Awareness

Helping users understand heart health risks, warning signs, pregnancy complications, and long-term cardiovascular effects.

Connecting the Dots

Helping users connect symptoms, pregnancy history, health conditions, heart disease risk, and self-advocacy over time.

Community

Helping users feel supported instead of alone while navigating pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and future heart health.

Key Features

  • Easy onboarding
  • Short health and advocacy-focused reels
  • Personalized recommendations based user's health background
  • AI-powered spoken self-advocacy practice for building confidence in care conversations
  • Apple HealthKit integration
  • Contextualizes pregnancy-related health conditions as factors that can shape lifelong heart health

MVP Scope

For the hackathon demo, Cardia includes:

  • A simple user flow
  • Pregnancy/postpartum status selection
  • Heart health and risk factor selection
  • Personalized heart health education feed
  • Tag-based recommendation logic
  • Awareness content about cardiovascular symptoms and complications
  • Advocacy-focused messages
  • Community support concept

Why Cardia Matters

Maternal heart health is too important to leave scattered across apps, websites, and disconnected data. Steps, heart rate, blood pressure, symptoms, and health guidance should work together, not force women to piece everything together alone.

For pregnant and postpartum women already carrying so much, finding the right information and speaking up about discomfort can feel overwhelming. This matters even more because women’s health is under-researched, and symptoms can show up differently in women than in men.

Cardia gives women clarity, confidence, and power. By bringing health data, personalized reels, self-advocacy practice, and encouragement into one place, Cardia helps users protect their heart health beyond pregnancy and postpartum, and advocate for the care they deserve

What We Learned

Through developing Cardia, we learned about the gaps that exist in women’s healthcare, especially surrounding maternal heart health. We discovered that much of today’s medical research and testing has historically been centered around men, leaving women underrepresented in healthcare data and more likely to have their symptoms overlooked or dismissed by healthcare professionals. While researching our app, we also learned how serious heart disease risks can be during pregnancy and postpartum, and how symptoms such as chest pain, dizziness, swelling, shortness of breath, and high blood pressure may be connected to larger cardiovascular issues that many people are unaware of.

From a technical perspective, this project was our team’s first experience using Xcode and Swift. Throughout the process, we learned how to properly prototype an app, improve UI/UX design, and use the Xcode simulator for testing and development. While building Cardia, we also gained experience integrating APIs like HealthKit and Groq into our Swift application to support personalized recommendations and heart health awareness features.

Disclaimer

Cardia is for educational and supportive purposes only. It does not provide medical diagnosis or treatment. Users should contact a healthcare professional for medical advice and seek emergency care for urgent symptoms such as chest pain, severe shortness of breath, fainting, heavy bleeding, seizures, or severe headache.

What's Next for Cardia

  • Machine learning system that uses onboarding data to personalize and recommend relevant educational reels for each user
  • Adaptive machine learning models that analyze real-time health data to continuously improve reel recommendations
  • Community tab designed to foster genuine connections, support, and shared experiences among users
  • Doctor interface that allows healthcare providers to view a user’s real-time health data and monitor potential concerns
  • Emergency contact feature that sends a notification to a selected contact if the user has not opened the app for 3+ days

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