KidneyCare

During my freshman year, I started getting into health tech and KidneyCare was the first long-term project that I worked on in this space. I worked alongside Amrita Kaur and Rachel Naidich under the mentorship of Dr. Marc Melcher (Professor of Surgery at Stanford Med and former president of the SF Surgical Society).

From a high level, our goal was to build a postoperative patient angagement platform for the kidney transplant team at the Stanford Medical Center. I worked on both the frontend and backend and created Bluetooth modules to interface with a patient’s blood pressure monitor and weighing scale. I also worked on building health metric dashboards using ResearchKit.

Technologies used:

• Swift and SwiftUI
• HealthKit, ResearchKit, CareKit
• Firebase and Cloud Firestore

To get a little deeper into it, I’ll start with the project background. Proper outpatient care is a vital step towards recovery post the kidney transplant operation. This process benefits from increased opportunities for patient maanagement and engagement through their doctor. This provides the opportunity for an app-based solution to navigate the post-op care process for a month (or longer) after transplantation.

The problem we were addressing starts with the over 500k patients in the US alone with kidney disease on dialysis. Transplantation is reported to be a better alternative, both physically and economically. However, non-adherence to medication regimens is a massive problem with fears of potential organ rejection and graft loss.

We ended up building a full MVP of the app and were able to present it to various stakeholders and get feedback from a handful of testers. Here is a demonstration video of the app in action.