StrokeSense
StrokeSense is an iOS app that teaches people the warning signs of a stroke.
After losing a close relative to a stroke, I volunteered at a stroke center in a hospital, and I was honestly disturbed by the paper education packets they still used. They were just pamphlets, likely to end up on someone's dusty shelf, and all that crucial information went to waste. So I designed a better solution: an iOS app people can have on their phone that does everything the packet couldn't, so the information can actually be understood and shared.
It teaches people the warning signs so a stroke can be recognized earlier, with quizzes, news that updates every week, articles, and podcast episodes I recorded with neurologists from UCSF, Stanford, UCLA, and Harvard. I cold emailed them, told them about the app, and they also reviewed the content and design with me. I built it in SwiftUI and co-founded it with my twin sister, who helped with the podcasts. It also has a website, and the code is on GitHub.
I'd been making apps since I learned Swift at 12. My first real app was a trivia game called Brain Battle. I showed it to about five friends, and by the next day it had 63 downloads, with people I didn't even know playing it. StrokeSense was my first app built to be actually useful instead of just fun. When I first built it in 2024, Claude Code didn't exist yet and AI coding agents weren't really a thing, so I hand-coded the whole app in SwiftUI. It was a real chance to put everything I'd taught myself together.
It has about 100 users so far. The biggest thing I learned is that building the technology wasn't the hard part. Adoption was. I tried to get it into hospitals through a contact at UCSF, but that's hard to do at 15, so I've been finding users in other ways, and I'm still working on it.