Creating an app to help prevent Alzheimer’s
In the previous post, I outlined a project that I will develop this year, while publishing stories on some of the interesting tools, technologies and methodologies that I will be using. In this post I wanna talk a little about what the app is going to be like.
The big idea
In my early days in the Apple Developer Academy at Mackenzie, São Paulo, I had the privilege to attend an amazing talk on the opportunities for app development in health. App developers have the possibility to use code to improve patients lives and help doctors with diagnosis and treatment.
Since that day, I have an intense passion for health and have been always involved with it somehow. There’s a huge universe of innovations to be discovered and created, and it’s definitely an area where developers can have a great impact.
Alright, so the app for the series will be about Health. However, that’s an immense area with infinite possibilities. Let’s try to use a few questions to focus on a problem that is both, specific enough so that an app can tackle it, but also, general enough so that it can help the lives of many people.
Narrowing it down with questions
When I was a linguistics student many years ago, I had the chance to collaborate in a project that would analyze language changes in patients with neurological diseases, and I became fascinated with the whole area of cognitive neuroscience.
One of the most widely known diseases that affect cognition is Alzheimer’s. I could bet that every single person reading this text know at least one elder who deals with it. Actually, if you think about it, chances are most of us will either develop the disease ourselves or be a care giver to someone with Alzheimer’s.
How could we help patients with Alzheimer’s?
There is a number of challenges a person with Alzheimer’s have to face everyday, and there are also many apps out there to help with those challenges. Obviously, there’s still a lot of room for apps to appear and help make their lives better! But I think I wanna go in another direction.
Some time ago I watched this talk by Lisa Genova — the author of the best seller Still Alice — and it made me wonder:
How could I help people prevent Alzheimer’s from developing?
How to avoid/delay it?
It is known that Alzheimer’s disease has an important hereditary factor and there isn’t much an iOS app could do about it. But in this case — as in most cases, by the way — the genes aren’t deterministic for the disease.
What other factors, besides genetics, are associated with Alzheimer’s?
There are basically two main fronts of battle where we can work to help avoiding the development of Alzheimer’s even if we do have the genetic variants associated with it.
Firstly, it is becoming more and more consensual that Alzheimer’s disease is associated with the concentration of amyloid-β. Research has shown that poor sleep, bad eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle are all factors that increase that concentration.
It raises an obvious question:
How can we help people eat better, sleep better and exercise regularly?
But there’s more to the equation.
A second factor related to Alzheimer’s is what researchers call a cognitive reserve.
In some cases, you might have the genes, live a lifestyle that is exactly the opposite of what is advised, which means you will increase the concentration of amyloid-β, and still show no signs of Alzheimer’s.
Think of Alzheimer’s as someone trying to destroy your sinapses (the connections between your neurons). If a person A has twice as many sinapses as a person B, when all other conditions are equal, the disease would have a harder time causing a “visible” damage in person A.
So here comes another important question:
How can we create more sinapses?
We create new sinapses by engaging in cognitive stimulating activities, such as reading a book, learning a new language, starting to play a new musical instrument, etc.
Now that leads us to another question about our users:
How can we help people engage in cognitive stimulating activities?
For some people, the simple fact of accounting to themselves is enough for them to learn something new or read regularly. For others, a discussion group may help. For others still, maybe a reward (even a simple badge in an app) will do. We don’t know yet, but there are definitely a handful of ways we can try to make people engage in those activities.
The challenge
With all that in mind, I came up with the following challenge:
Create an app that helps people eat better, sleep better and exercise and also engage in cognitive stimulating activities.
The goal for the app is helping each user to live a healthier lifestyle — that will prevent the concentration of amyloid-β — and exercise their cognition in a daily basis — in order to create a cognitive reserve.
Drafting the first features
Looking at it from a distance, the app needs to do basically two things: (1) track the user’s lifestyle (eating, sleeping, reading, learning, etc.) and (2) encourage the user to improve their lifestyle.
For the first part, we should take a look at the HealthKit api, where we can have an idea of how much the user is exercising and also learn about their sleep. Another source of information is the user input. They need to tell us how they are eating, what they have been reading, etc.
For the second part, we will definitely count on push notifications to remind the user about the app and make sure they input the relevant information. Also, we can think about creative ways to encourage people to read more and study different topics.
We will go a little deeper from a product point of view in a later post, where we will also consider the frameworks we’re gonna use and start the code with a simple MVP.
Any comments, suggestions and feedback are all very welcome!
