Framing the Problem:
Over 240,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the United States. Among these women, nearly 36.7% experience some type of mental health disorder during their treatment, with roughly 10% facing severe depression, and 27% having minor depression or intermittent depressive episodes. Despite high survival rates—91% for non-metastatic breast cancer—the mental health challenges continue beyond treatment, leading to issues such as anxiety, depression, fear of re-diagnosis, brain fog, and fatigue. Additionally, support services often diminish after remission, making the transition to normalcy especially difficult for young breast cancer patients (ages 20-45).
Project Overview:
In response to these challenges, our interdisciplinary team of student engineers, designers, and developers created Thrive, a health and wellness app specifically designed to support breast cancer patients and survivors. Thrive emerged from the first Design in Health course offered to undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin, a collaboration between the School of Design and Creative Technologies and Dell Medical School. This course united passionate students to address complex health issues using innovative design strategies.
Objective:
Thrive is driven by the principle of support-first design, aiming to maintain healthy habits and improve wellness from diagnosis through survivorship. Our goal was to create a practical tool rooted in community support, addressing the ongoing physical and mental health issues faced by breast cancer patients and survivors.
Outcome:
Our team successfully developed a high-fidelity app prototype using Figma, which demonstrates the app's functionality and user interface. Additionally, we created a comprehensive website to support the app and provide information and resources for breast cancer patients and survivors. These outcomes represent a semester of dedicated work and research, with the hope of making a meaningful impact on the well-being of breast cancer patients and survivors.
The website can be viewed at thrive.com