Smartphone app to keep the ‘doc’ away

The app is expected to assist older people, their relatives, patients and those who do not have ready access to technology.

The app is part of a competition titled Pitch. Entries for the 2014 round of the competition offers a share of $40,000 in prizes to University of Wollongong (UOW) staff and students to get their innovative ideas off the ground.

It was through winning seed funding at the UOW Pitch 2013 competition that has enabled dietitian and honorary clinical lecturer Kelly Lambert to develop her idea for a smart phone application that would help people with chronic kidney disease and their families better manage their health.

Her healthy diet app was borne out of frustration at the lack of necessary and informative detail available on food packaging and knowledge about the constituents of fresh foods. 

Her pitch, honed through training received at UOW Pitch, was to pose a seemingly simple question: If you had to choose the healthiest food option for a person with kidney disease what would you pick – a bag of potato chips, a bottle of orange juice or a banana?

If you answered the banana, guess again.

While bananas are a great food choice for healthy people, they contain high levels of potassium, which can be potentially fatal for people with late stage kidney disease and those undergoing kidney dialysis treatment. Yet, not all packaged foods list potassium content and few people have a good knowledge of which fresh foods are high in potassium.

Through UOW Pitch 2013, Ms Lambert won $4,000 in the staff category and is close to launching a comprehensive diet management application for people with chronic kidney disease.

“Chronic kidney disease patients undergoing renal dialysis were constantly asking questions like ‘Are oranges ok to eat?’ It’s too hard for some people to decipher food labelling or remember long lists of foods and it led to thinking there must be an app for that,” Ms Lambert said.

“One of the big problems with existing diet applications is that they draw on US data which can be very different to the foods we consume in Australia. With the money from the Pitch competition I was able to take the idea to a developer who was willing to work on building an app suited to kidney disease patients.”

The app provides the user with functionalities that allows them to enter their vital health statistics and create a health profile that will set limits on their daily intake.

In the supermarket aisle, the user can search a database of more than 3,000 foods for a specific item or meal and learn about its content or scan a bar code to receive data on packaged foods or even entire meals.

In addition, the app can be used to keep an eating diary and the data then emailed to dietitians who can analyse eating habits and provide dietary advice to help people with kidney disease better manage their condition.

“It gives people dietary freedom to be sure about what they are eating and sometimes even alert them to foods they didn’t think they could eat,” Ms Lambert says.

“We know there are 10,000 people in Australia undergoing renal dialysis but there are about three million who are at stage three of kidney disease so we have a looming tidal wave of people who need accurate information to help them retard the disease’s progression.”

She hopes to launch the app later this year and, in particular, make it an essential part of the information toolkit for people diagnosed with kidney disease.

Read more details or apply for the UOW Pitch Competition 2014.