Flourish

Problem

Despite the growing prevalence of chronic illness in the US, the community has remained under-recognized, understudied, and underserved. To effectively diagnose and treat chronic illness, healthcare providers must understand how their patient's illness manifests. However, for people with multi-symptom chronic illnesses, managing a complex combination of symptoms and triggers can be overwhelming, making it difficult to effectively communicate their concerns with providers.

Solution

Flourish started as a project in the Senior Design Challenge class, and its creators applied to DALI to see it come to life. The mobile app is designed to help patients with multi-symptom chronic illnesses track their symptoms, triggers, treatments, and more. The app uses existing research in conjunction with user data to help users better understand their illness by creating graphs that help uncover correlations in their health data. From the app, users can also easily generate custom health reports for their providers, empowering users to take control of their own health narrative.

Impact

Flourish provides nuanced insight on under-researched chronic illnesses that will not only help patients collaborate most effectively with their healthcare providers to develop a plan of treatment, but will also contribute to the general public and research community's knowledge and awareness of chronic illness.

DIFUSE Data Component

Funded by the NSF’s data science DIFUSE grant, Flourish incorporates clean, clear data visualizations to relay statistically rigorous insights from its confidential user database directly to users.

The DIFUSE grant’s funding helps Flourish maintain a database of confidential medical information and implement data visualizations that can simultaneously show symptoms, time, triggers, medications and more to users in a way that isn’t overwhelming.

Flourish not only displays its data clearly to its users, but also conveys analyses of that data simply and effectively to them. Flourish will examine which of a user’s symptoms correlate strongly with each other, analyze whether a change in medication dosage results in a reduction of symptoms, and match triggers with symptoms algorithmically. Flourish’s implementation of current data science and visualization techniques, as well as its foundation of empirical medical research, make it an excellent conduit of data literacy to the general public and a fine match for the DIFUSE program.

For more information email: difuse-pi-group@dartmouth.edu