ChronicCare

ChronicCare: A sympathetic, illustrative application for Multi-Dimensional Data Management for people suffering with Chronic Pain

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Inspiration

People with chronic illness deal with pain their entire lives; for them pain isn’t temporary, instead a constant of life. The only way they continue to maintain any quality of life is by executing different management techniques throughout their life. This often requires the unruly hit-and-trial method: going to new specialists, trying new therapies, starting over with new medications, etc. It is also critical to note that people with chronic pain do not just deal with localized pain: chronic pain over time often manifests in all bodily systems overtime: so one could start with having neck pain, and overtime this could spread out to the surrounding joints and muscles leading to shoulder, back pain, headaches, etc. People with these conditions often also deal with brain fog, which can make keeping track of all data extremely hard; Many patients have also been on the receiving end of gaslighting due to being unable to remember things.

All this requires thorough data management: whether it is in the financial realm, in terms of time management, or in the health realm of tracking one of the thousands of symptoms people with chronic pain deal with. One major problem seen in the market is that only separate apps exist to handle each of these categories: 1 for symptom tracking, 1 for medication tracking, 1 for appointments etc; There is no consolidated application which presents this data in a user-friendly format.

Presenting to you ChronicCare, which does it all and ensures it presents the user with a solution to all the problems above, in a concise, visually-pleasing, and interactive format. ChronicCare aims to not treat its patients as a statistic but more like a person, something which a lot of apps lack lately. This has been done by sprinkling some upbeat messages here and there on the application

What it does

ChronicCare combines the goal of providing an enigmatic UI/UX design with the bigger goal of social good: serving and including the community of people suffering from Chronic Pain into the general society such that they too are able to handle their lives at the same level as the others who don’t have such challenges hindering their day to day lives. ChronicCare presents its users who may be suffering with chronic pain with multiple features to give them a clear-cut summary of how their pain journey is going from all dimensions. This multi-dimensional data management includes :-

  • financial management
  • schedule/time management
  • health management such as pain symptom tracking, treatment plan tracking, and a consumable format of history and trends, acting as a hub of centralizing medical records, documents etc.
  • inclusion and respect: adding a touch of empathy in the application for the user unlike many apps in the market which treat people with chronic illnesses as a statistic
  • accessibility: the UI/UX design of this application makes it applicable to a large population, finally including those who do not want to spend copious amounts of times switching between different apps just to get all this information, aka people with chronic pain, who along with pain often also deal with gaslighting and mental distress when dealing with their physical pain.

  1. The Landing Page: Summarizes all the patient’s recorded stats in 1 view making it easier to digest information and even present it to a third party for reference.

  2. Symptom Tracker Page: Provides patients with an easy, visually appealing, interactive way of tracking their pain. Users can select a body part that hurts instead of having to name it , dismissing any plausible causes of misunderstanding. They can then rate this pain on a scale of 1-10 using a slider scale instead of having to describe in long terminology how they feel; This gives them a quick way to track their pain. However, they can always describe their pain after rating it if they’d like.

  3. Appointments Page: Provides a calendar view where users can view their appointments.

  4. Treatment Page: Allows users to add both medication and non-medication types treatment plans.

  5. Upload Info Page : Allows users to upload images, videos and documents. When dealing with hundreds of specialists over your life, it can be hard to keep all your documents in one place. Users can upload these items here to keep data secure in a centralized location and find it whenever needed.

  6. Expenses Tracking: Now this is an extremely important feature; This page focusses on indicating ALL the expenditure that was made towards helping you manage in your chronic pain journey. Many people often forget what they spent money on other than medication, however here users can track things like:-

    • medications
    • appointments
    • devices/apparatus bought off websites/shops for relieving pain -> massagers
    • misc -> eg: parking when travelling far away to a new specialist This can help patients view a quality breakdown of their medical expenses so they can file claims with their insurance for everything that may be possibly be covered. We all understand healthcare is often overly expensive and ChronicCare wants to help you plan all your expenses and claim anything that can be covered!

  7. Insurance Info: Finally, added a page where users can add their insurance info. People can have multiple insurances at a time, and this page can help users ensure if any of their insurances have expired, their IDs, etc.

How we built it

I designed this using VueJS, HTML, CSS . Yarn packages and npm were using to host the application.

Challenges we ran into

I wanted to add a lot more information and features to my application; in fact I used some libraries which could even help edit the body selector-> so if in the profile, the individual said they were missing a leg, our body selector page (one which tracks pain symptoms), would emulate that and also have a missing leg aka personalization and customization! However, I didn’t have enough time to add that feature in.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was proud to be able to finish this project to a presentable extent during these hackathon hours with the only sacrifice being an all-nighter and some shivering!

What we learned

  • I learnt how to use some external VueJS, Vuetify libraries and build them into the yarn package.
  • I learnt how to prioritize certain items over others when it comes to development and rolling out a presentable feature.

What's next for ChronicCare

I ran out of time because I would really like to expand some features:

  • Print a summary report into a PDF with a click of a simple button so you can submit it to your doctor.
  • Customization/personalization of the Human Anatomy selector on the Pain Symptom tracking page based on the user's body.
  • Converting this web application into a mobile application since it seems mobile apps are higher in demand.

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