Zudu’s Groundbreaking NHS mHealth Project Wins Award

After working with the NHS on several projects the team at Zudu are delighted for their Ccard App project to win a Mobile Health Award at the prestigious Digital Health and Care Awards in Edinburgh. Read more about this exciting project below.

In 2016 the team at Zudu embarked on a groundbreaking project with NHS Tayside to build Scotland’s first ever Condom distribution app aimed at people aged 16 to 24 years old. This innovative mobile app project utilized gamification, smart analytics and cryptography to achieve one clear liberal and progressive goal; To educate young people about sex and foster safe, consensual relationships whilst safeguarding their sexual health by providing access to free condoms.

From the proposal phase Zudu worked closely with the Sexual Health team to understand their requirements and ensure they received the best possible solution considering a limited budget. The requirements were split into four fundamental functions:

1. First and foremost, the app would allow young people to find condom distribution locations with ease via an interactive map

2. The app would also provide an informative area for sexual health education and to provide a place of contact for those in need of further help

3. In line with the target market, the app would be fun to use and encourage usage through innovative means

4. The physical CCard would be digitized for young people to collect condoms at the respective distribution locations with ease

Through various ideation sessions, focus groups with young people and functional specification meetings the Zudu team decided to approach this project with the following technology considerations:

• In order to allow users to find condoms quickly the app was integrated with GPS location mapping to ensure directions could be obtained when using the app
• A content management system was integrated to allow healthcare professionals to update locations regularly and update information within the app
• Zudu integrated an interactive quiz to encourage multiple time use – this quiz was designed to be fun, tongue-in-cheek and engaging where users can view the results in real time
• The quiz is also integrated with push notifications to further encourage user engagement, and responses captured can be utilized by the NHS
• The digitized CCard was coupled up with a web app which allows health care professionals in ‘unlock’ locations to provide unique codes based on the young person’s information. The vital function of this was to ensure through cryptography that none of this information was personally identifiable, but still provided the NHS with vital stats e.g. location of where young people are using the app most/least
• Other techniques such as changing the colour of the CCard for under 16-year-old users was an innovative technique to ensure health care professionals were aware that this person was under the age of 16 and potentially vulnerable

The app was launched on 14^th Feb 2017 to coincide with Valentine’s Day and has so far received tremendous feedback from users and healthcare professionals alike. For more information on this app please visit our website case study and the app landing page we created. You can also download the app from the iOS and Android stores by searching for CCard App – NHS Tayside.