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Saturday, March 26, 2016 - We're so 'Appy

A project log for my.Flow

my.Flow is the world's first tampon monitor, tracking saturation level with the goal of eliminating period anxiety, leakage, and infection.

amanda-briefAmanda Brief 07/10/2016 at 20:260 Comments

Ah, phones. Can’t live with...out ‘em. Virtually all emerging hardware devices feature a companion app, and my.Flow is no exception. As do most developers, we want our app to be realistically useful, visually appealing, and perhaps most importantly, incredibly intuitive.

Our smartphone UI alerts our users as to the saturation level of their tampons by communicating with our Bluetooth-enabled wearable. Once we decided on this primary function, we set out to determine what, if other, options, displays, and information our users might find helpful. We opted to provide graphical representation of flow over time, both on monthly and daily levels, predictions of next period and ovulation cycle milestones, options to adjust notification frequency and content, and information on our product, menstruation, and vaginal health in general.

We had originally started during our class project with an Android app, but based on market research of a subset of our potential users, we transitioned to iOS, with a brief stopover at Evothings (highly recommended for tester apps!) in the middle there.

Our current iPhone app - designed by Mark Ruiz - features a homepage that displays realtime saturation level notification, both visually on a circle, and exactly via percentage. The next page displays flow trends, and the following pages allow the user to learn more, and modify the content of their notifications. Modification of their timing is done on the first page, as displayed in the second pane below; the user simply holds their finger over the gray dots that appear, which grants them the ability to drag the dot, which becomes green, to anywhere on the circle - when saturation reaches that level, they will receive a notification.

We've gotten rave reviews on this latest version, and are continuing to iterate. We are also excited to use our app to collect data and create a macro-database of menstruation, the likes of which have never been seen, with applications in the healthcare, insurance academic, clinical, and research sects. The vast majority of women we talked to – 82% – are comfortable with having their data aggregated to our server and shared with the health community at large in order to learn more about the period as a biological phenomenon, and to improve products like ours. This brings a highly exciting and applicable B2B application to our tech.

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