PK-You

example interface

Inspiration

One of our team members has a close family member living with PKU, a rare metabolic disorder affecting approximately 1 in 10,000 people. Watching them manage their daily phenylalanine (phe) intake through notes apps and handwritten logs made one thing clear: a community managing a lifelong medical condition deserved a real tool, not a workaround. That personal connection drove everything about how we designed and built PK-You.

What it does

PK-You is a phe tracker built specifically for the PKU community. Users set their daily phe limit (prescribed by their dietitian), log meals from a database that actually includes PKU-specific specialty foods, and track their compliance over time through a color-coded calendar. The app shows a live budget ring so users always know how much phe they have left in the day.

How we built it

We designed the full UI in Figma using Figma Make to prototype and iterate quickly. The frontend was built with Vite and Tailwind CSS in VS Code, giving us a fast, responsive interface without a lot of boilerplate. We focused heavily on the user experience, every design decision was made with a real PKU patient in mind.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest technical challenge was integrating the food database API and getting it to return accurate phe values rather than just generic protein data. Phe data is not standardized across nutrition databases the way calories or macros are, which meant we had to work around inconsistent data sources. Getting the API connected and returning reliable results took significantly more time than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we built something with a real person in mind, not a hypothetical user, but someone we know who lives with PKU every day. Every screen we designed went through the question "would this actually help them?" and that kept us honest throughout the entire process. On the design side, we're proud of building a cohesive visual language from scratch in Figma, the compliance calendar, the phe budget ring, and the specialty food directory aren't features you find in any existing app. We designed them specifically for this community. We're also proud of shipping a working prototype in a single hackathon session. Going from a personal story to a deployed, designed, functional app in one day is something none of us had done before.

What we learned

We learned how overlooked rare disease communities are in health tech. Nutrition APIs are built around calories and macros phe data is inconsistent, hard to access, and often missing entirely for the specialty foods PKU patients actually eat every day. That gap surprised us and made the problem feel even more worth solving. We learned that design decisions in a medical context carry real weight. Putting the budget ring front and center and making logging as fast as possible aren't just aesthetic choices. For someone opening this app five times a day for the rest of their life, friction and clarity actually matter. We learned that the best projects come from genuine empathy. Having a personal connection to PKU didn't just inspire us but it made us better designers and builders throughout the process.

What's next for PK-You

Barcode scanning for packaged specialty foods, multi-profile support for parents managing a child's intake, expanding the low-protein specialty food database with brands like Loprofin and Cambrooke.