PILLBOX

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If you've ever had to care for a sick child, an elderly relative, or have been bedridden yourself, you know how difficult it is to track multiple medications and when you need to take them. We know how much of a hassle this is, so we set about to replace sticky-note reminders and paper schedules with an app for your phone that does the hard work for you.

Pillbox began with user research: we interviewed professional caregivers, and drew upon our own family experiences as caregivers for elderly relatives.

We decided to focus on the non-professional caregivers and aimed to solve two big problems:

1. Make it easier to track the pills your family and friends need to take.
2. Make it easier for you to communicate with the doctors and fellow caregivers of your family and friends.

To do this, we designed Pillbox to work with Microsoft HealthVault as a datastore. For the purposes of this demo, we set up a fake data service to simulate a connection with HealthVault.

(Unfortunately, the Windows Phone CTP does not currently support the X.509 certificate authentication necessary to connect to HealthVault.)

With Pillbox, you can check off when medications are taken, and easily get more details on those prescriptions. You've got easy easy access to contact information for the doctors and caregivers in your social circle. You can even leave notes about a patient for doctors and other caregivers. All of this data would be stored and shared across multiple devices using Microsoft HealthVault.

As a general rule for good user experience, we tried to avoid lengthy data entry on the phone. Prescriptions, schedules, and contacts in Pillbox would all be set up in HealthVault on a desktop computer.

Pillbox uses the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and a Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) framework based on the work of Rob Eisenberg. We took great care to keep everything "Blendable" throughout the design process. Using the new Sample Data in Blend 4 not only sped up our design work, but it allowed us to bring in a Visual Designer—who had never touched Blend or XAML—and get him fully up to speed on the tools and the project within the two weeks.

If we can make a functioning demo app in two weeks with only three people, think of what we can do for you. Give us a call at 801.561.1074, and let's talk more about it.