Fighting Disease with the Universal Windows Platform
Daniel Paulino created the Windows 10 Pillbox app to help his mom.
In his day job, 24-year old Daniel Paulino helps oncologists and other doctors at the BC Cancer Agency. He’s a computational biologist at the Vancouver-based healthcare institution, working on a team that develops and improves bioinformatics software–mostly Linux-based–to better analyze cancer biopsies.
Last fall, he decided to use his developer skills to help his mom, Dulce Paulino. She suffered from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease, and took up to 12 medications a day. Remembering to take the pills at the prescribed times was a hassle. Sometimes, she would forget.
Dulce used a Windows phone, a Lumia 535, so Daniel wanted to develop a mobile app to remind her to take her medication. He picked up his Surface and started sketching out possible solutions. Over the next few weeks, using Windows 10 tools and Visual Studio, he developed version 1.0 of Pillbox.
The Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform app features a clean, simple and intuitive user interface: With just a few taps, users can add time and dosage for each medication, as well as other users and their prescriptions. Pillbox’s other features include automatic syncing of medication information across platforms, OneDrive back-up, and the ability for users to print out a list of medications.
But one of the app’s most important features is an audio alarm. Unlike other medication-reminder apps out there, Pillbox sounds an alarm–instead of an on-screen notification–each time a user is scheduled to take a pill. The alarm gets increasingly louder until the user turns it off. This feature was specially built for Dulce, who had poor hearing as a side effect of her medications.
Pillbox also helped Dulce at her many doctor’s appointments. At every doctor’s visit, she was asked to list all her prescriptions. Handily, the app can display all medication in a simple list.
“Before, my mom had twelve photocopied pages of all her medicine to show her doctors. Then, she just started showing them the app,” he said.
Since its release in September 2016, Pillbox has helped not just Dulce but many others. The app has been downloaded more than 5,000 times so far, and has an average 4.3-star rating in the Windows Store.
“This app has been a godsend,” said one reviewer on the app’s Windows Store page. “The number of pills and doses is hard to keep track of and this app solves my problem perfectly.”
Not bad for a first-time Windows app developer.
Early interest in technology and app development
Even as a kid, Daniel liked to tinker with technology and solve problems. One day when he was in middle school, his dad brought home an old Pentium 4 PC that someone left on the curb for free. The computer worked, but it was very slow.
“So, I went online how to figure out how to clean out the adware,” he said. “I went into the registry and navigated around there, and I learned to how make animations shorter to improve performance.”
Daniel graduated in October 2016 from Simon Fraser University, a public research university in British Columbia, with a degree in bioinformatics–the science of collecting and analyzing complex biological data. He also completed a summer internship at Microsoft, where he and his team of interns developed a Windows Phone productivity app for Microsoft Garage.
Now, even though he’s busy at the BC Cancer Agency, Daniel is laying the groundwork to develop more Windows 10 apps. First on the list: a transportation app to help Vancouver commuters more easily get from Point A to Point B.
“I want to fill that space,” he added. “I have some ideas to make it better than what’s out there now.”
But he’s still improving Pillbox. Almost every day, he receives feedback from users–some of whom, like his mom, are chronically ill. They tell him how much they like the app, and what new features would be helpful.
As a result, the app is on Version 1.3; its new features include support for Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual digital assistant. Now you can say, “Pillbox, show my medicines for tomorrow” or “What’s in my pillbox today?”
The app is part of Dulce’s legacy. She died two weeks after attending Daniel’s college graduation of complications from an infection.
“In a way, I think the app was her last lesson for me,” Daniel said. “She’s always taught me the value of giving back to the community.
“She often encouraged me to use the gifts and talents I have to help or empower someone else. With Pillbox, I feel I’m doing exactly that.”
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