Lynne Birth Control Tracker

Empowering women to take control of their birth control with personalized solutions.

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Inspiration

Missing a birth control pill is not like missing a vitamin. It is 99% effective only if you take it at the SAME exact time EVERY day. Based on a CDC report, 43% of unplanned pregnancies occur due to missing contraception, resulting in stress, depression and physical challenges to a woman's body.

Our app provides personalized birth control reminders, patient advocacy tools, and educational resources integrating them into something that users already rely on daily: their phones.

According to the CDC, oral contraceptives are the most common form of contraception for young women ages 16-29. Yet 40% of women have reported that they have missed one or more pills in the last month. Most of which reported that it was due to busy and inconsistent schedules. By delivering reminders through their most-used device, our app ensures women can take control of their health with ease and consistency.

What it does

Personalized Reminders

  • Sends timely reminders to take your birth control before your scheduled time, waits for you to check in, and continues sending reminders throughout the day until you confirm, packed with unique notifications that highlight the importance of taking it on time.
  • Integrates with your Google Calendar to recognize your schedule, and suggests taking your pill beforehand. It’s better to take the pill early rather than never!

Patient Advocacy

  • Features an AI-powered chatbot that supports users by:
    • Tracking and logging symptoms over time, allowing patients to review their health history before doctor visits, empowering them to advocate for themselves.
    • Offering conversational and easy-to-understand answers to questions based on peer-reviewed scientific studies,
    • Storing all patient information locally and securely, ensuring complete privacy.
    • Using collected symptom data to handpick educational articles posted in the Education tab.

Education

  • Provides a curated library of articles and resources on birth control usage, benefits, and best practices to help users stay informed and have access to trusted information that suits their needs and circumstances.

How we built it

We used a combination of modern technologies to create a seamless and intuitive mobile app experience:

  • Expo: Expo is a framework for React Native, and it allowed us to rapidly build, preview, and test our app across iOS and Android.
  • React Native: React Native has cross-platform capabilities, and it allowed us to build a single codebase for both iOS and Android.
    • We used Async Storage to store user data securely on their device.
    • We implemented App Routing for smooth navigation between different screens and features.
    • We also utilized React Native Notifications to create timely and custom reminders for pre- and post-pill notifications.
  • iOS Simulators: XCode iOS simulators allowed us to rigorously test the app’s functionality and user experience on different iPhone models, giving our final product a polished design.
  • Gemini APIs: Integrated Gemini APIs to power our AI chatbot, providing conversational answers to users based on peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Challenges we ran into

  • Expo (especially iOS builds): While Expo allowed us to easily import dependencies, we often ran into dependency conflicts. This included incompatible dependency versions, breaks due to the installation of niche dependencies, and much more.
  • Google Calendar Authentication via API: Integrating Google Calendar into the app proved to be a significant challenge due to Google’s strict API security measures. We ran into redirect URI issues, which turned out to be more difficult to resolve in mobile apps.
  • Cross-Platform Inconsistencies: All members of our team had different hardware, which resulted in inconsistent app behavior across commits as we tested our app. This resulted in longer delays in debugging as issues were sometimes tied to the specific hardware/system architectures.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Impact: We are proud to work on a project that we believe to have an impact on millions of women. By tackling the issue of missed contraception, Lynne will make a tangible difference in reproductive health, reducing unplanned pregnancies and promoting physical and mental well-being.
  • Leveraging GenAI: We leveraged Google’s GenAI Gemini model to power our chatbot, allowing our users to more easily connect to the resources they personally need. Learning GenAI tools helped scale our app to better personalize user experiences via personalized articles and recommendations.
  • Honing Debugging Skills: Throughout the hackathon, we worked through challenges in our project architecture. This included navigating cross-platform inconsistencies, troubleshooting Google Calendar API integration, and resolving issues with Expo’s iOS builds. Despite the difficulty of these tasks, we persevered, and are proud of the results we came up with!

What we learned

For some of us, this was our first time using React Native and Expo. While it was a steep learning curve, we all enjoyed creating an app that we could envision ourselves using daily. We also learned the importance of committing changes fast, while simultaneously resolving merge conflicts through strategic branching. Lastly, we honed our skills in iterative product design by seeking feedback from challenge mentors. Their guidance helped us refine our ideas and ensure the app met both user needs and technical requirements.

What's next for Lynne Birth Control Tracker

Lynne represents more than just a birth control reminder app – it’s a step toward empowering women to take control of their reproductive health with confidence. Looking ahead, we’re excited to refine and expand Lynne’s capabilities with:

  • Smarter Personalized Reminders:
    • Location tracking to remind users to take their birth control with them.
    • Detecting travel and adjusting reminders for time zone differences.
  • Community Building:
    • Creating a forum page for the community to share their thoughts and experiences, and answer questions posted by other users.
  • LLM Fine Tuning:
    • Refining our LLM’s accuracy by augmenting its knowledge base with more contextually relevant data.

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