breathe ilo App — Improving Women’s Health and Modernizing Family Planning

Imagine you could revolutionize family planning and women’s health with nothing more than a single breath. That is the task that Carbomed, one of the leading names in the FemTech industry and nominee for the Austrian State Prize for Innovation, embarked on. Carbomed is spearheading technology for women with the breathe ilo fertility tracker. By analyzing the CO2 content of the exhaled air, the device can reliably predict women’s menstrual cycles and thus help them to not only be in more control of family planning, but also facilitate a greater and more complete understanding of their body and health. Paired with a smartphone, the data as well as general information about one’s cycle can then be tracked with an app.

Parkside Interactive was tasked with the relaunch of the aforementioned app using new technologies. In order to provide an improved user experience as well as new ways of purchasing the hardware, the updated app should include a greater range of features. To reduce maintenance costs in the future, the app development should switch to a cross platform technology. With its new features, the app should also be ready for a successful market launch in North America.

One of the primary challenges during the development phase was the coordination of all our mobile developers together with developers from Carbomed to work together on the app while meeting a tight deadline. In addition, the pairing of the phone together with the breathe ilo device meant the implementation of a custom Bluetooth interface, which required upfront research on our developers’ end.

Among the prominent new features is the intuitive “Today” screen. It provides the user with information on their current cycle phase and what kind of exercise and food are particularly suited for that phase. In this way the user is always provided with the most vital data and with ways of how to best accommodate their physical needs when it comes to exercise and diet choices. As regards the development of this feature, the lack of any pre-existing UI components that could satisfactorily display this information meant that our developers had to draw a custom and dynamic component that would adhere to the design. The app further provides a calendar for an easily accessible overview of:

In case there are not enough measurements that have been taken in order to reliably predict future cycles, the user receives a corresponding notification in the app.

In order to get a clear picture of the symptoms of the respective cycles and how the user’s behaviour, physical activity and diet are connected to them, the app has a journal function in which various aspects of those symptoms can be tracked. This data includes a wide range of information such as current mood, diet, intensity of exercise done that day, possible aches, the current status of their period and their libido. To promote a maximum of knowledge about the user’s physical wellbeing, the app also offers an integrated blog / wiki containing a variety of scientific articles on subjects related to the menstrual cycle.

With an updated tech stack powered by Google Cloud technologies, the rehauled app is now not only ahead of its time in respect of its many functions that bring new awareness to women’s health, but it is also equipped to penetrate new markets and make waves in the US. The new tools that were used such as the Firebase backend allow for a modern, sleek and efficient management of users, authentication and databases. The added intelligent features ensure that users dispose of a holistic and detailed overview and gain a deeper understanding of their own health.