The Gut Stuff

Challenge

Twins Lisa and Alan Macfarlane grew up sharing many common traits. But after participating in a study at the Royal College in London, the duo discovered that despite having 100% identical DNA, their gut microbiomes shared only 30–40% similarity. This revelation explained why their bodies behaved so differently and led them on a fascinating journey into the world of, well, everything gut-related!

Today, the Gut Stuff team is on a mission to help everyone improve their gut health according to their unique needs and lifestyles. As part of this mission, the team aimed to develop an app that would inform users about their gut health and serve as a resource for those seeking advice, personal health tips, and much more.

Previously, JetRockets developed a minimum viable product (MVP) for the platform. Now, the task was to expand the functionality and provide users with more opportunities to interact with the app. The functionality of the electronic diary - Gut Tracker, has been upgraded, offering users health recommendations, challenges to improve their metrics, and reporting features to enable more diligent monitoring of gut health and beyond.

Solutions

CMS — Utilizing the client's brand guidelines, JetRockets crafted an appealing and adaptive application. The implementation of a tailor-made CMS ensured a seamless content management interface. Furthermore, ongoing enhancements to the CMS facilitate effortless configuration for the application, enabling user behavior tracking, statistical management, and various other streams of data.

Tracker

This easy-to-navigate tracker enables users to track their food, hydration, mood, poop and even explores how they feel overall. The tracker helps users understand how their body works and will give them a great tool to spot good or bad patterns. 

The tracker assists users in understanding if they're experiencing any symptoms and how much physical activity they are participating in. Additionally, users can view important gut health data via reports emailed to them and viewed on their laptop or mobile device.

We implemented these categories for daily tracking:

• Poo — Allows users to track their poo each day.
• Water — Let users track their water usage throughout the day.
• Stress — Enables users to input their stress levels to track throughout their gut health journey.
• Food — Where users can log their meals and snacks, edit their quantities, and utilize the platform’s calculator to log their calories.

• Exercise — Enables users a place to log and track their daily physical activity;
• Me Time — This is where users can input something they did for themselves on any given day that doesn’t necessarily have to do with their gut health journey;
• Sleep — Offers users a place to track the hours they slept at night;
• Symptoms — Let users document symptoms they may experience whenever they occur;
• Gratitude — This is where users can create and reflect on things they hold an appreciation for and alter as they see fit;
• Things I Discovered About My Gut — Whether users have specific challenges with their gut or not, this section is excellent for logging any patterns users have discovered or anything they’ve identified in their gut health journey in order to assist users in further understanding their bodies.

Push notifications

Push notification notifies users when:

• If the user has started using the free trial version of the application;
• If the user did not participate during the free trial;
• If the user has not completed the registration quiz;
• If the user has completed the trial period;
• If the user has subscribed to use the application;
• Providing weekly content such as tasks, focus topics and reporting;
• Reminders and tips for users;
• Reminders so that users can track their progress;
• If the user does not perform any actions in the application

Results

Today, Gut Stuff offers users a way to get to understand their gut and how to take care of it properly. The platform enables individuals to set and meet their personal goals and assists users in making the jump from following fad diets to living an informed, healthy lifestyle

Going from Project to Partner

Gut Stuff and JetRockets are already planning for our next collaboration to develop the second version of the Gut Stuff platform, in which we’ll be focusing on:

• Community features
• Membership
• Push notification strategy
• Full launch
• 121 referral clinic and additional marketplace features

The Gut Stuff mobile app MVP technology stack:

We use the latest versions of libraries and frameworks unless otherwise specified. When a new version of a library/framework is released, we will also update it on the project (maybe not immediately, if the update has broken backward compatibility).