Inspiration
Medical errors are preventable adverse effects of care, and while they shouldn’t exist at all, they are the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States, and over 200,000 patients die each year from preventable medical causes. One of the most common medical errors is nonadherence, resulting in over “$100 billion in preventable medical costs per year”(Kleinsinger).
Additionally, In the midst of recovery, patients—especially older adults—face more than just physical symptoms. According to the NIH, chronic illness is a key predictor for loneliness. (Petitte et al.) and a staggering 60% of chronically ill patients report feelings of loneliness (Theeke and Mallow).
Both nonadherence and medical loneliness represent a broken patient recovery system, and through conversations with cancer patients, cancer survivors, surgery survivors, and nurses, we saw how isolating the healing process can be, we saw the potential to empower individuals in their recovery process, helping giving them hope or peace during one of the most difficult times of their lives. What if recovering didn’t feel like something you had to do alone, and what if the common, daily chore of taking health medication was joyful? How could we bring these two into one cohesive patient experience?
Imagine a robot named Clamshell that delivers people medicine in a joyful way, controlled by an app that connects patients with others going through the same recovery as them?
In this vision, Recovrly was born.
What it does
Recovrly is a two-part system that brings both community and consistency to recovery. Recoverly App: Users can share progress, celebrate milestones, and support each other in real-time. Whether it’s walking for the first time in weeks or completing a medication cycle, Recovrly turns healing into a shared story. The app includes a profile page where people share their milestones, a feed page where the user can see the posts of their peers, and a community page, where people can see the posts of people with a similar recovery type as them. We also integrated an AI chatbot to support patients with questions about their illness, reducing anxiety and improving self-understanding along the way. Lastly, the app includes a way to assign its duties.
Clamshell: The users have access to a box of medications that will open and close according to when they need to take their medication. When they enter a time into the app, the robot’s lid will open, revealing the medication, as well as a cheerful message from a dog saying “PILL TIME!”. After an hour, the lid will close again and go back to normal. Thus, the medication experience is punctual and personable, giving people a positive habit they can use to aid their recovery process.
How we built it
We began by building the full-stack app from scratch, with user authentication, posting, and milestone sharing, and a medication-calendar setting. We used Javascript for the backend development, and react for the front-end.
For the hardware, we took on the perilous challenge of building a device without a 3D printer, making the robot via the integration of an arduino uno and improvised office supplies. We programmed the arduino via the arduino IDE, allowing it to recognize messages from the computer sent through 9600 bit serial numbers. Then, we used a javascript library to export this serial command when a particular time occurs.
This seamless integration between software and hardware required coordinating frontend UX, backend timing logic, and microcontroller communication, and a servo motor.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest technical hurdles was linking the app's backend to the Arduino hardware. It was simple to program the arduino to receive commands from the native Arduino IDE, but discovering the communication strategy that the IDE uses and replicating that in javascript and integrating two different systems was very difficult.
Additionally, without a 3D printer, it was difficult to create the robot that we imagined. However, through origami, structural assembly of utensils, and masking tape, our prototype represents the reality that we wanted to create with Recovrly. In the future, 3D printing technology will make the design more durable and aesthetic.
Social media apps require several interlocking functions to work seamlessly together. We had to create protocols for users signing up for the app, logging in, posting, viewing a general feed, viewing a feed for just community members, as well as a personal chatbot and a calendar setting mechanism. When we coded one of these, oftentimes, another would fail, and debugging this took hours.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of building a fully functional hybrid system—web + hardware—in just 24 hours. The fact that the Recovery Robot physically moves, smiles, and speaks on time (with our pug’s enthusiastic “Pill Time!”) makes us grin every time.
We’re also proud of our empathetic design philosophy: we didn't just build tech, we built a tool that makes recovery feel seen. Watching users interact with the social platform, smile at the pug, and understand their condition better showed us we were on the right track. And, despite limited tools, we built a product that stands on three pillars: compassion, creativity, and code.
What we learned
We learned that technical complexity only matters when it serves a human need. Every feature we built was rooted in human empathy, but oftentimes, the technical challenges made us lose sight of the actual problem we were trying to solve. For example, we spent a while trying to design a robot that had extreme functionality, including multiple lids for each day, and segmented pill slots. However, we realized that our time was actually better spent if we included a simpler design, but with a cheerful, cute dog appearing when the lid opens. We figured, based on our own experience, this would be what actually makes peoples’ lives better, more so than a functionally optimized design
We also learned that hardware-software integration is a team sport—requiring constant debugging, time-syncing, and cross-functional collaboration. Working without access to traditional maker tools pushed our creativity and taught us to think like engineers, not just developers. We would split our time working on either the app or the arduino, communicating often about how we wanted Clamshell interactions to be represented in the app.
What's next for Recovrly
In the future, we want to augment Clamshell capabilities to include wifi-controlled behavior rather than controlling it directly through the computer. This will be much more useful for users, as they could put the robot in a convenient location, rather than next to their computer. Additionally, we hope to refind the design of the robot, giving it a hard, plastic shell to aid in durability and aesthetics. Next, we want to survey people in a recovery process to assess demand for this product in a real environment. We will assess demand for the robot and social media app independently, as the ideas are distinct enough that people may be particularly interested in only one. However, if people are receptive to both then the distinct pairing of robot and app in Recovrly will stay the same.
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