Can we look at Care as a form of maintenance instead of as an emergency call for chronic issues? Can we look at Care as something to cultivate rather than to delegate?
New health issues are increasing rapidly, due to environmental conditions and GMOs as well as for the newly acquired technical ability to test for them. For many (new) health issues there is yet little knowledge. Often the research is guided by profit-driven decisions, in the interest of big pharmaceutical corporations or exclusively within the analytic tradition.
To look at care as a life practice. We take a health issue like histamine intolerance as a concrete example for which it is clear and mandatory that food intake and lifestyle are determining the severity of the health condition. In defining “Care” I would like to work around the question: Is our diet and lifestyle shaped around products or can we brake out of this path and empower ourselves in designing products - an app in this case - that help us define which food and lifestyle combination is better for each unique person? Can a tool help eventually finding one’s way to still eat or drink that food by combining it differently and so on?
Need or problem you are attempting to solve*
How can one learn to listen to her body and track, compare, and be systematic with the help of technology. The idea is to help people to be more in touch with their body rather than alienate from it. How to empower users with a system that guides them in tracking aliments and environmental reactions, observe cross behaviors, and share that information with other users. A guided digital diary can be very helpful in a case like histamine intolerance where the combination of foods, cooking and food preservation, as well as lifestyle, and environmental conditions, all play a great role, in an intricate and complex combination. Histamine intolerance has been chosen as a concrete case to work with because it’s a health condition I suffer from myself and for which I would like to have a tool that helps me deal with it. From a developer standpoint it will be a tool that I can test in first person. Next to it, there are more and more friends who have found they are affected by this condition, so it will be as well easy to find a group of people for preliminary usability testing.
Beneficiary, single person and/or community*
Beneficiary will be both single persons and the community in a mutual exchange between users affected by the health condition and those who want to participate and make use of the app like doctors, researchers, practitioners and more.
Solution, brief description of the project*
A first version of the app will be essentially A GUIDED FOOD DIARY.
Obtain information and make your own list of safe foods, referring to a build-in food list of: high-histamine, anti-histamine, anti-inflammatory and cross- check it with a list of typical symptoms and reactions. The idea is to allow users to add #tag foods, behaviors, and symptoms with the intention to generate knowledge and work in the direction of creating a community and use data-analysis for a second version of the app. The food diary can help create awareness and be a systematic tool in finding out which foods provoke reactions and to which degree. It can help to expand one’s diet, follow elimination diet systems, help re-introduce single foods, and monitor whether these provoke any reactions or not. It can help apply more logic to why certain symptoms occur and when. It can be used to help one’s general practitioner or specialist in doing more targeted testing. It can be a great support in case of multiple intolerances as well.
Technologies already adopted or that you are planning to adopt*
We are a two-women team whit design and development skills. We will start with IOS , and consequently adapt for Android.
Website (or socials)
We are planning a dedicated website that will follow all the steps of the project.
License, that you are planning to use
Open-source
Current status/stage of the project
1) Setting the theoretical ground with references to relevant texts for this idea from thinkers like: Michael Foucault, Silvia Federici, Cristina Morini, Yuk Hui, Donna Haraway, among others. Based on this theoretical ground I would like to gain insight and discuss the approach with experts from the OpenCare network as well as with possible users from the local community.
2) Observing the context - UI-UX and Algorithms, comparative analysis and design: by looking at existing apps, like: “Food Intolerances”, “All I Can Eat”, “Your food Intolerance”, and other food intolerance apps, as well as other apps on different health issues, as for example, the menstrual cycle tracking app, “Clue”.
3) Sketch out of a wireframe flow for a testable minimum viable product or prototype. The wireframe will also address issues like users privacy and handling of private health information
