Introducing mAdapt: Filling a Gap in Refugee Women’s Reproductive Health
mAdapt launched their app in early August 2017.
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RHoK Winter 2017 team mAdapt are launching the first iteration of their mobile platform to deliver refugee women’s reproductive health information.
As the Syrian refugee crisis unfolded midwife and women’s health advocate Beccah Bartlett identified a significant lack of accessible and localised reproductive health information for women of refugee backgrounds.
After two years of planning, Beccah’s idea became mAdapt, a group of Australian and US-based volunteers working on a tech solution for this vital issue.
The result is not just a one-directional platform for health information, the mAdapt service will also gather anonymous user data to inform the North Western Melbourne Primary Health Network for improving access to relevant care.
mAdapt came to RHoK earlier this year in need of technical expertise to develop this online platform and participated in our June 2017 Winter Hackathon.
Beccah was partnered with RHoK member Stephen Dodd who helped introduce agile thinking to a number of technical business problems that mAdapt faced and they garnered a dedicated team of volunteer techies with a broad set of skills.
As a result, the crew were able to work building and refining on the mAdapt back-end, front-end, UX testing strategy, social media and data-logging.
This work continued at RHoLLs four times since the hackathon to get ready for today’s initial launch thanks to General Assembly providing them space to work.
“RHoK was the linchpin event to getting mAdapt to launch. I consider myself very lucky to have been chosen and that the volunteers wish to continue.”
From a technical perspective, the mAdapt platform utilises a React, JS front-end with Segment and Postgres on the backend.
Today’s release is their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and is available in English and some Arabic with a focus on services in Melbourne. Following this, they plan to improve the detail of the Arabic and integrate additional languages.
In the longer term, the service will be scaled through Australia, beyond just refugee communities and Beccah has a global network in mAdapt’s five-year plan.
