wildflowers: a Medicine Adherence Tracker

Medication information is pulled from HealthKit and loaded into the app
Patients are notified when to take their medication and are encourage to complete specific tasks associated with medication adherence
Completing tasks gives patients rewards for their virtual garden - from removing weeds to planting new flowers to growing an amazing garden

Inspiration

Medication adherence is can prevent up to 125,000 deaths/year and reduce hospitalizations by 10%, equating to a $100B reduction in healthcare costs. To tackle this challenge, we were inspired by the minimalistic yet fun nature of useful apps such as Forest and wanted to create a similar layout through the healthcare field. After going through several ideas, we eventually settled on medicine adherence and found that topic interesting. The theme of flowers came up due to its versatility in how much we can tie into growing and tending to flowers with the planned features of the app.

What it does

This app accesses a user's medical records with consent and uploads the medicines that they are currently taking. Users can also add new prescriptions or edit records to ensure they are getting the right notifications. The app then notifies the user when it is near the time to take their pills through an integrative message (eg. "Time to water the flowers! Take 1 pen humira to complete task" or "Let's remove some weeds! Remember to take 1 pill aspirin to complete task"). Users then log their medication and each completed task creates a new flower in the garden or provides another virtual reward for their garden.

How we built it

We created a wireframe of the UI/UX in Figma, and began implementation in Swift with HealthKitUi.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges formatting the prototype on Figma so that the transitions for each interactive part of the interface went to the right locations in the app. HealthKit and creating the iOS app was also difficult to navigate, since neither of us had experience working in these environments, although we did learn a lot over the coarse of the hackathon and were able to make some progress with integrating HealthKit into the app!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the layout that we created on Figma and how it effectively displays a minimalistic yet fun prototype.

What we learned

We learned that there are quite a few issues in healthcare over patient reliance that could potentially be examined through a technological perspective (eg. having a patient approach an issue through an app--does that increase participation? What issues does this app mitigate?) and bring about new interactions with healthcare through these technological creations.