BreatheEasy

Managing your own personal asthma care can be a stressful and confusing endeavor. Managing the care of multiple children if you are a parent, dozens of students as a school nurse, or another child’s care as a babysitter can be an even more harrowing task. BreatheEasy is an asthma management mobile application designed to make pediatric asthma care a breeze. It strives to make asthma information accessible and consumable in order to empower individuals to take control of their own personal asthma or the asthma of those that they care for.

During BreatheEasy’s semester with Scout, the goal was to develop a brand (e.g. logo, fonts, colors, voice, personality), an MVP (minimum viable product) of a mobile application for Android and iOS, and a component guide (a set of rules for future designers and developers to use when building new features to keep everything consistent). It was an ambitious amount to take on for a single semester, but the Scout team was well equipped to get it done.

The team included JoJo Lee, a UI and UX designer; Karina Masri, a UI and UX designer; Anna Rychlik, an illustrator and graphic designer; Matt Panzer, lead frontend developer; Jonathan Tseng, frontend and backend developer; and Jonathan Northcott, project lead and backend developer. The “EzBreathers” were a stacked team with the skills needed to tackle this large project scope in the 12 weeks that they had to get it done.

BreatheEasy, led by co-founders Alin Clement and Nikita Kachroo, came to Scout with initial designs made by Alin and access to dozens of industry professionals through Nikita who works at IMPACT DC, an asthma clinic located in Washington DC. In addition to the knowledge and experience that they brought, Alin and Nikita had put together documentation for the IDEA Ready Stage which contained information on their business plan and competitor products  which helped shape the vision for BreatheEasy that would be presented at the end of the semester.

The application’s UI/UX was done by JoJo and Karina who designed components and put together wireframes for each of the screens that were in the development plan. The designers had to prioritize their decisions based on what was more important for a particular feature: traditional design principles or focusing on accessibility factors relevant to a healthcare product. 

For example, the red, yellow, and green associated with zones in an Asthma Action Plan sometimes would clash with the current color palette on a screen, but it was more important to highlight those zones than to match the other colors. Additionally, JoJo and Karina had to work closely with the developers to make sure their designs wouldn’t be too difficult or time consuming to implement.

The BreatheEasy logo proved to be a difficult challenge that took the entire team’s help to solve. The team started with every member (even developers!) coming up with 25 different sketches (that’s 150 different logos!!). The ideal concept had to convey BreatheEasy’s values without being too literal. It also had to avoid coming off as too much like a boring healthcare app while still appearing professional. The final concept came from Karina’s brainstorm, and she worked with JoJo to produce the refined version. The tree looks to be blowing in the breeze and there’s a subtle heart created by the foliage. Logo work was done in parallel with everything else for most of the length of the project, but it was all worth it because the final product fits beautifully into the larger BreatheEasy brand.

Illustrations

The BreatheEasy product had to be compatible with Android and iOS and use industry best practices to protect user’s healthcare information. Because information would be shared across multiple users and had to be kept in sync, the developers needed to create a backend that all the mobile applications could communicate with instead of simply storing information locally on a user’s device.

Matt led the frontend development with help from Jonathan. The application used React Native with Expo which allowed for quick testing on iOS and Android devices. This made development much easier because developers could see the effects of code changes in real time. Expo also allowed developers to work in the editor of their choice, and handled most of the configuration and package building.

Jonathan and Jonathan (yes there were two, and yes it did get confusing) built the backend infrastructure. Python was the language of choice for this portion of the product, and a Postgres database was used to manage the many different models that the application required. 

It took multiple iterations to settle on Python as the backend language of choice. The dev team tried several Javascript frameworks and ORMs (Object Relational Mapping), but none were flexible enough to support the complex data relationships needed for this project.

These language choice iterations ended up putting development behind schedule which in combination with an ambitious project size had the code deliverable fall behind the wireframes. In hindsight, the scope of the project should have been adjusted to the shorter timeframe. 

The team was able to build a brand and product that won Alin and Nikita funding in a hackathon for a developer to pick up where Scout left off. Next steps for BreatheEasy are to seek additional funding in the IDEA Go Stage and to begin user testing in asthma clinics in Washington DC. Scout can’t wait to see what the future holds for BreatheEasy and its team!