Peanut Pal

Background

The practice of Oral Immunotherapy is used to treat young children with severe food allergies. The therapy works by taking increasing amounts of a solution over the course of a year. This process needs to be documented over time. After taking the daily dose, the patient can not exercise until two hours after taking the dose. A voice application could provide this functionality by talking to the patient and reminding them when to take doses and when they can exercise again.

Executive Summary

An application that would run on some sort of voice controlled speaker could solve this problem. There are multiple API’s that currently exist that can be used to achieve this. The application would enter dosage information into a database that parents of patient could access any time they wanted to. Also the application would remind the child every day to take the correct dose and it would confirm after the dose is taken, so it is recorded. If no dose is taken, it could remind the parents to give the dose. Also it could recognize the difference between parent’s and child’s voice so it could have parental override features.

Viability Analysis

Some difficulties associated with this project would be the interaction between application and child. The voice recognition could have problems with the speech of a child. Another problem would be creating a complete documentation, if a child does not take a dose some day, or there are other issues there needs to be an override option or else the documentation would not be complete. Also there is no real way to validate if the child actually takes the dose, they could just lie. Lastly, there needs to be safeguards in terms of the dosage, the application needs to have failsafe features that make sure the correct dose is always given.

Risks and Rewards

The major risk involved in this project is the safety of the child undergoing therapy. There should be guards in place so the child never is directed to take the wrong dosage. The reward of this project is that it could be widely used by parents and physicians to help complete Oral Immunotherapy. It could have widespread exposure if the application streamlined the process to the point where the parents had minimal interaction.

Closing

With the growth of Oral Immunotherapy this application is on the cutting edge of medical technology and mobile technology. It has the potential to help anyone who is undertaking the process of OIT. Also this project has the potential to help many children treat themselves with minimal help from parents, and all they need to do is talk.

Print PDF