MedsConnect Voice Activated Diabetes Companion

Inspiration

The story began 3 years ago when one of my friend's children was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, since then, they have to remember everything. Different medications, different insulin doses, with different timings, blood glucose levels that they have to keep track of and record for the next doctor visit, too much details for them to remember, so we decided initially to create "MedsConnect" a patient engagement mobile app that helps patients with chronic diseases to keeping a record of their medications, labs and measurements. However when we tested that concept with patients they have reported couple of issues; first, they said that reminders don't integrate with their daily activities, and second, some caregivers reported that the patients may be too old or too young to use smartphones apps and that sparked the idea of using voice activated home/personal assistant devices to integrate with the patient's daily activities at home and also to be easily used through natural language interaction.

What it does

We will add a voice enabled chat component into our medicine reminder app that integrates with devices like Google Home and Amazon's Echo, this is going to be disease specific and we are thinking to pilot that with Diabetes type 2 and then we can roll it out to Diabetes type 1 and then to other diseases. The non tech savvy users can simply talk to the device:

Patient: Hi MedsConnect ..
Google Home Device: Hi John, did you take take your Victoza injection today, it was due 2 hours ago.
Patient: yes I did.
Google Home Device: That's cool, let me record that in your personal health record.
Google Home Device: Did you get a chance to measure you blood glucose after the dose?
Patient: yes, it was 299 mg/dL.
Google Home Device: Ops that a bit high, this is the second high reading this week, consider talking to your doctor.

How I built it

It's not built yet but the plan is to have:

iOS/Android native apps (completed)
Adding the chat component to the app.
Google Home/Echo apps.
HIPAA enabled backend server to store the patient personal health record.

Challenges I ran into

Patient health information privacy and security.
Funding.
Developing the right clinical steps and responses to suite the individual needs for different patients.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Completed the smartphone reminder app on iOS/Android.
Winners of the second place in Ro'ya startup competition organised by Dubai Business Women Council and MasterCard MENA.