TRACK
Quick Tracking allows you to record the degree of the most common symptoms of endometriosis you are experiencing. These categories include sliders to measure your pain and can be answered once or multiple times a day. Ultimately, this feature allows you to create a consistent stream of data that will later empower you when speaking with your healthcare provider.
It also allows you to track flaring, bleeding, medication, and sexual activity to see how these variables influence your symptoms. You can expand on the types of medication you take, the volume of bleeding you experience, and the types of sex you have (penetrative, clitoral, etc.) using our Notes feature.
CHOOSE
Dive deeper into your health data. Tags help you pinpoint precisely where in your body you are experiencing symptoms, how you are experiencing them, and how you are managing them.
LEARN
Our Programs feature showcases different video series created by professionals a part of the endometriosis community. These series help you implement supplemental methods like nutrition and breathing exercises into your symptom management routines. Our current programs focus on topics like nutrition, meditation, breathing, and pain-relieving yoga.
SEE
Data Visualization allows you to take control of your care by giving you a clear vision of your health. There are no confusing spreadsheets or unreadable charts. Instead, we created color-coded Daily Symptom Averages and Calendar Overviews to offer you an overall view of your symptoms and health Factors for each day or over the span of a month. This strengthens communicating your treatment options with your healthcare provider because you can't say no to data.
Our Philosophy
Chronic period pain is not normal and the culture surrounding "period pain" is hurting us all. We believe the normalization of “period pain” contributes to the inadequate care and the 7-year-long average time to diagnosis experienced by people with endometriosis.
BUILT BY YOU
Our app was built after collecting thousands of insights from people living with endometriosis. We saw a pattern. Pain needed to be proven in order to receive adequate care. We want to provide a solution to better understand and help communicate the core endometriosis symptoms.
EVOLVING WITH YOU
Our app is always evolving and learning from our community. As our community adds new Tags, we create a more complete picture of how endometriosis affects the body. As you track your symptoms, you create a more complete picture of your health. If you think we are missing a feature, let us know. We want to ensure our app meets your needs.
YOUR SECURITY IS OUR PRIORITY
We are committed to keeping your data secure. Your data is primarily stored on your device and the symptoms you track are encrypted. We hold backups of some of your data on Google's Firestore secured servers located in the European Union, but only you can modify this data. For more information about Privacy and Security, visit our FAQs page.
Understanding Endometriosis
On A Personal Level
We put a strong emphasis on scientifically-accurate data and approaches to healthcare. However, we believe that the individual experience of health is just as crucial as numbers and figures.
Therefore, we created Endometrix by first understanding the problems people with endometriosis face on a purely human level. We solidified this understanding through implementing the Design Thinking process, which focuses on five methods: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, then testing.
1. EMPATHIZING
The first and most valuable stage of the Design Thinking process for us was empathizing with our potential users. We started with active listening to create a clear picture of their lives and a thorough understanding of how they feel.
We posted in a Swedish Facebook group called Heja Livet to gauge interest for people to share their stories. After receiving a generous response, we reached out to more than 30 people with endometriosis and endometriosis-like symptoms to conduct interviews and gather their insights.
We then conducted a focus group so our responders could share and bounce their experiences of living with endo and their ways of coping with it with one another. This helped us recognize that although 10% of women have endometriosis, experiencing its symptoms and treating them is very individual.
2. DEFINING
We began to define the problem we wanted to solve by transcribing and analyzing hundreds of these individual experiences. We identified over 30 common themes among our results, including prolonged diagnosis, misdiagnosis, emotional trauma, fighting for care, pain management, and lack of control.
Once we categorized these hundreds of individual experiences, we recognized a pattern between them: people were receiving inadequate, impersonal care, and their pain was not being taken seriously by their healthcare providers.
3. IDEATING
With the problem defined, it was time to start ideating. We knew that there was no simple solution, so we began brainstorming a list of potential overlapping ones. Our first idea was to create a national Endometriosis Disease Register. We pitched this idea to Karolinska Innovations, but we lacked the resources and strategy to get it going, so we went back to the drawing board.
Our next idea was to provide an accessible way to track endometriosis symptoms, then visualize the trends between these symptoms and the regimes that effectively treat them.
4. PROTOTYPING
With the problem and a potential solution established, it was time to create a prototype, which was the first beta version of the original Endometrix app.
We then conducted testing on this first version of the app with a small batch of users. We wanted to learn whether or not we were on track to help our users receive respectful and adequate care.
This first round of testing helped us realize that while the app was an accomplishment, it still didn't provide our users with the value they needed to understand and help communicate their health. So we went back to the drawing board.
5. TESTING
Fast-forward to Spring 2020. By then, we created a new beta version of our app to begin testing that serves as the foundation for the now-available Endometrix app. We called this series of testing Champions, and during it, we analyzed personal feedback loops with more than 30 people and did in-depth interviews with them to understand our app's value and opportunities to improve.
6. REPEAT
Today, we have an app based on extensive qualitative research that aims to address the complicated and comorbid nature of endometriosis while remaining mindful of our users' personal experiences. However, the Design Thinking process is never-ending for us.
We will continue to expand our app's features and improve its capabilities, but first, we need your input on how these should work for you. This way, we can continue to create something that helps you receive the care you deserve.
Understanding Endometriosis
On A Macroscopic Level
Endometriosis is a challenging medical condition with potentially debilitating effects on life quality. It can affect any uterus carrier of any ethnicity or age, it is challenging to diagnose, and its symptoms and the severity of them vary from person-to-person.
So the question we faced was: how do we design a tool for a disease that is complex, heterogeneous, and poorly understood?
The answer is data. More precisely, data covering endometriosis that can accurately visualize how people individually experience it.
In December 2018, we put together a survey with the hopes of understanding how endometriosis first appears, the nature of the condition, common (and uncommon) symptoms, the emotional impact it has on people, and how endowarriors manage their symptoms. The survey had more than 40 questions, and we received more than 1600 responses in the form of multiple-choice questions and free text answers.
At this time, we met our soon-to-be Chief Scientific Advisor Elisa Dioguardi, who was an infertility researcher at Karolinska Institutet. She had a look at our survey and set out to connect the dots between our data. Her goal was to understand the clinical implication of endometriosis and its impact on our user's social well-being and quality of life. She aided her analysis of our survey by conducting literature reviews on multiple chronic gynecological conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, and vaginitis.
For instance, her research led to the list of symptoms and outcomes for endometriosis that we’re currently prioritizing with our tracking feature. These symptoms focus on pain during sex, pelvic pain, emotional health, productivity, and self care. We also recognized that these symptoms uniquely affect people with endometriosis. This led us to enabling users to “tag” tracking questions with the location that they are experiencing symptoms.
More than 1600 survey responses and 200 articles later, we had a better understanding of endometriosis, its risk factors, and its comorbidity. However, we will continue to tie our researching methods to Design Thinking principles as we introduce new features and improve the app’s capabilities.
