Apps push right buttons for healthy hearts

TWO young Ennis men have collaborated to develop two new iPhone apps, both of which are aimed at preventing heart disease.
Neighbours Mike McNamara (23) and James Treanor (20) from Drumcliffe have developed Croí FoodWise and Croí HeartWise, which have just been launched on the app store. Mike is a medical student at NUI Galway, while James is studying computer science at UCC.
The collaboration resulted from work Mike was involved with two summers ago. “I was doing medical research in Galway for the summer with Croí. They have a programme called MyAction where people who have high risk factors for heart disease, things like high blood pressure and diabetes, are taken on a 12-week programme and they work on things like exercise, diet, alcohol and smoking. It was really successful. The programme went brilliantly and after that I had the idea of putting the programme on the iPhone to bring everything from it to as many people as possible.
“Preventative medicine is about catching things before they happen and reaching as many people as possible would have been the aim. I spoke to my research supervisor Dr Gerard Flaherty and to Croí as well and they were really excited. Last summer we started making the app. I got on to James and he showed me some of the ropes about programming for iPhones and I learned a lot of that and the two of us made it together over last year.”
He said they tried to keep things as simple as possible and explained how the apps work. “When you’re out shopping you can look at food labels on the back of food packaging. You press a few buttons and it tells you whether a food is mainly good or bad. There’s red, amber and green and it’s really handy for people.
“The second one is HeartWise. This one’s a bit bigger. We’re trying to motivate people to have a healthier lifestyle so the idea is that when you first set up the app, you put in a certain amount of information about yourself and it gives you your heart age relative to your own and it shows you where you’re starting from. The app has four main sections, diet, exercise, alcohol and smoking. Each of the sections is laid out pretty similarly. It has guidelines on how much you should do and what’s healthy. It can grasp how much you’ve been drinking or smoking and how much exercise you’ve been doing.”
James said they both used their expertise to complement each other. “Mike contacted me when he became involved with Croí. He got all the medical information and research for it and I designed the technical side and wrote the code for it. We thought it’s a great idea to help people keep track of the health of their heart, so they can be aware of when they reach their limit of alcohol or what their recommended level of exercise should be. It’s an area where people aren’t really aware of what they should be doing.”
He said he would like to make a living from developing apps in the future. “It’s what I’d love to go into. It’s an area that’s growing a lot.”
Announcing the launch of the apps, project supervisor Dr Gerard Flaherty, a lecturer at NUI Galway and director of the special study module in preventive cardiology, delivered in conjunction with the Croí MyAction team, said, “With the widespread use of smartphones and iPads by people of all ages, mobile applications represent a highly effective means of delivering key health promotion messages to a wide audience with the aim of orienting individuals towards healthier lifestyle choices.”
The apps are free to download from the app store onto the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch devices and will be updated regularly. Since their release, they have been downloaded in over 25 countries and Croí HeartWise has achieved a five-star rating.