Indian women iOS app founders who broke glass ceiling

Indian women-developed iOS apps set to improve the digital well being of people living in cities and even in villages.

For the past several decades' everything related to technology development was a male bastion, but in the recent years the scenario has changed across the world and ever so in India; Several women are taking up serious interests in innovative technologies, and are acing it like champs.

DH had an opportunity to catch up with two emerging female mobile app company founders who are poised to improve our lifestyle for good with ubiquitous mobile phones.

PregBuddy:
PreggBuddy's origin has a heart-wrenching story behind it. Sivareena Sarika, the co-founder had a personal story to share. Her cousin went through a miscarriage and found it difficult to manage the trauma. This could have any women in a nuclear family in the city, where young couples in a city find it hard to get emotional support from each other due to a fast-paced lifestyle and work stress.

Sivareena Sarika, Co-Founder, PregBuddy Technologies

With so many strides made in technology, Sarika found dearth in helping expectant mothers and this apparently convinced to her develop PregBuddy in collaboration with Subhadeep.
Sarika initially started speaking to mothers and pregnant women over a WhatsApp group, asked questions, listened to them and after four months of conversation, they started working on the development of an app that would cater to the unique requirements of new and expecting mothers.

PregBuddy is available in both Android and iOS versions. The latter has improved a lot in recent times thanks to experts at Apple App Accelerator program. Sarika and team met Apple's top iOS experts and received software tools, training, and suggestions on how they could refine PregBuddy interface and offer best user-experience to the subscribers.
With PregBuddy on iPhone and iPad, expectant mothers can read short articles on a week-on-week basis about their baby, the body changes, food & nutrition and most importantly, they can also connect with their gynecologist throughout the nine months of pregnancy. This will definitely help people to understand themselves more and also most importantly help them decipher myths from the truth about body changes during the nine-month pregnancy period.

It also offers tips when to take a test, offer the option to add doctor appointment reminders, exercises, medicines in the personalized Antenatal Calendar (ANC).
The PregBuddy has a Watch version, which by the way was developed with the help of two young WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) scholars, Harish and Tarun, with one of them is high school kid, Sarika said.

With the Watch version, PregBuddy users can just log weight, symptoms, and vitals with just voice commands. Owners can also see their pregnancy week and day right on the Watch Face! They can also view upcoming test or appointment or Lamaze class right on their personalized Antenatal Calendar (ANC) on your Apple Watch face.
Globally, PregBuddy is the first maternal health app that allows an expecting mother to track her vitals & symptoms right on her watch.

Sivareena Sarika's message to upcoming women developers:
I would urge them to not shy away from choosing technology as their field because someone said it's not for them. If you want to do it, you learn and grow by doing it.

Wysa: Be happy not perfect

Wysa iOS app is developed by Touchkin, co-founded by Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati. Wysa too had a heartbreaking beginning, but thankfully with a happy ending.

In the late 2000 and early 2010, Aggarwal served as the lead in several big MNC companies. With more responsibilities, she faced high work pressure and leading to depression. However, she was able to recover from it. She began developing positive thinking and eventually convinced to devote herself to develop an application for a ubiquitous device like mobiles, which can help people facing similar situations and thus led to the creation of Wysa app.

Jo Aggarwal, Founder, Touchkin

"It seemed like everyone could use a place to vent their worst thoughts and feelings and learn how to deal with them. Perhaps an AI bot could do that. The idea of a chatbot doing therapy was not a new one. The first chatbot, in fact, was called ELIZA and was a parody of a Rogerian therapist. We thought, let's make something like ELIZA, but actually WISER, and that's where the name WYSA came from!" Aggarwal said to DH.

Wysa's AI-based bot is advanced enough to read the user's depression level and read-out relaxing words to calm them with empathy. Wysa's AI bot suggestions are research-backed, widely used techniques of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy), the company claims. It also uses Yoga and meditation techniques to manage stress, anxiety, sleep, loss and a whole range of other mental health and wellness needs.

The game-changing feature is coming soon to Wysa

Most apps, which offer real-time response service usually work best with the Internet on. But, most often than not, people with depression take trips to isolated locations and in some situations, they may go out of cellular network range. Then, even with anti-depression apps, they will not get the necessary help.

Wysa app; picture credit: Apple iTunes store

To overcome this, Wysa developers are betting big on Apple CoreML kit of the iOS and top-notch chipsets present in iPhone, Watch and iPad, which will help AI-based algorithm work even without internet connection and be able to respond and prevent the device owners from taking any rash decisions.

Also, the company is working with experts at Apple App Accelerator to develop a voice-over feature that will help the visually impaired people to use the Wysa app.

It can be noted that all the responses and queries exchanged between the user and respondent are encrypted and they all remain anonymous to each other.

As per the latest count, 1.2 million global users have installed the Wysa app, and among them, 20-per cent accounts Indians.

Jo Aggarwal's message to upcoming app developers:
"I would say, app development is such a great leveller. It doesn't matter if you are young or old, female or male or anything in between, fat or slim. You build something that people love, you can change the world. You don't need any permission from anyone.

Don't look at app development as a path to becoming a software developer. See it as a way to scale whatever you want to do - if you are passionate about music, or charity, or art, or sports. Being a great product/ app developer can help you bring your ideas to scale without needing to raise capital or hire other people."

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