PillTrak+

Inspiration

A few years ago, I had an arrhythmia manifest. It was unexpected, frightening, and we had no idea what caused it. I was taking a stimulant at the time, which my doctor theorized was what triggered the event, but we had nothing to confirm that theory. I ended up getting a special case for my phone that could record an EKG, and capturing the next event, but the case was expensive, bulky, and inconvenient. And in the end, we just had a snapshot of my heart activity without any correlation to my medications, so I thought there must be a better way. So I came up with the idea for PillTrak+; an application that correlates when the user takes their medication to their heart rate. I pitched the idea to the cardiologists who handled my case, and they thought it could be immensely helpful to the industry, both for the heart rate linked to the times doses are taken, as well as tracking how well patients abide to their prescriptions.

What it does

PillTrak+ reminds the user when it is time to take their medication. If the user cannot take their medication right then, there is an option to snooze the reminder for 15 minutes. If the user snoozes for an hour, the app will stop reminding them and mark that the dose was skipped. Meanwhile, the smartwatch of the user is constantly logging the heart rate of the user every few minutes, and timestamping each heart rate taken. At the end of the period, the timestamped heart rate logs are put side by side with medication usage, and sent to pharmaceutical companies that produce the medications the user is on, as well as health care and insurance providers. One user's data alone can be used to see how the user is reacting to their medications, and see their compliance with their treatment (which is one of the largest issues in the medical industry today), and their care can be improved on an individual level. More importantly, however, the data of all patients taking a particular medication can be looked at together to find changes in heart rate when two medications are taken together, or how a patient is affected when they miss doses in a certain pattern. Analysis of this data will allow the pharmaceutical companies to reduce the risks associated with their product.

How I built it

I created the reminder application for iOS using swift. This would allow me to use Apple's HealthKit API to pull timestamped heart rate data (I can't actually access this without paying to become an official Apple developer). Medications would ultimately be selected from a list of companies that use our data collection services, and those selections would have targets the data would be sent to already associated with them. Insurance companies could also be sent the data, and the user could give their data to their health care professionals if they ask for it.

Challenges I ran into

My main challenge was my unfamiliarity with swift. I've never made a full application before, and making an application that communicates with so many different outlets was foreign to me.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I created a working application, and a version that can be used to demo the idea of the app.

What I learned

I learned how to pull heart rate data from smartwatches, and fully develop iPhone applications

What's next for PillTrak+

To take this to the next level, the application would need a visual overhaul to make it ready to give to consumers, and then we would need to partner with pharmaceutical companies so that we could give the data to them to improve their products.

Built With

• swift