Sickler

A Sickle Cell help app

Sickler is a platform that monitors sickle cell patients in real-time from anywhere worldwide. This application could easily monitor Sickle cell patient details such as the amount of water they drink, their blood level, their oxygen level, Nutrition, Meds, Complications and other essential details.

What inspired Us

Sickle cell disease is still very much a prevalent disease in our community here in Cameroon (Africa) affecting thousands of Cameroonians. We know how hard it is to manage a disease such as it. The strain it brigands to the patient, their parents, and the entire family as a whole. I have family and friends that have been affected by this dreadful disease, and I have personally lost 2 of my siblings to this disease. I currently have one sibling, living with the disease, and I know how hard it is for Sickle cell patients. So we decided to help in the best way we can, and as software developers, we thought creating an application that can help sicklers manage the disease can prove to be of great help to improve their quality of life.

Sickle cell is a disease that causes a mutation of the red blood cells that turn them into a sickle shape, A crisis occurred when these sickle-shaped red blood cells stuck together around joints and important organs causing pain and organ failure in that area. Complications include organ failures such as kidney, liver, and heart failure - and in some occasions can lead to the patient becoming crippled, situations like strokes and blindness are also very common

How is this situation handled?

Sickle cell is an inherited genetic disease, meaning it is a disease that’s gotten only from birth For a child to be affected, both mother and father must carry one copy of the sickle cell gene, also known as sickle cell trait, and pass both copies of the altered form to the child. Concerning a cure, they’re a few but none that are readily available for use in the African community Hence, the only way sickle cell patients can get help is by managing the disease. This is where Our project Sickler comes in.

How we built our project

We at Team Sickler worked very hard to build this application. We did a study to find out from sickle cell patients themselves what they considered important for their health, and with that knowledge, we could incorporate them into the Sickler app. Let’s take a look at the features that the app brings. The application was developed using the Flutter framework and utilises the Google Cloud Platform and Firebase for its backend.

Challenges we faced

We faced numerous challenges during the building of the project. The challenges we had were both technical and non-technical. For instance, getting to talk to sickle cell patients about the features they would like to see in an application like this, proved to be quite challenging. We were able to locate some health professionals and sicklers that gave us insight into the challenges that Sickle cell patients face, and how to best manage them. We also had difficulties in actually building the application, how we would go about implementing certain features, and more.