Healthcare
Mobile App
Shipped
Praana's old app was a booking page from another era. We turned it into a care platform with two faces. One app for families watching over their parents. One for the health workers who knock on the door.
1,000+ frames, two shipped apps and a documented design system, shaped by real conversations with doctors, hospital staff and Praana's founders.
frames of shipped screens & iterations
Built and documented Praana's first design system components and usage guidelines
Designed the field app too, Praana Guide: check ins, visit records and the daily grind of care operations.
27/7
Praana
1m ago
Requested assistance
Turned a single booking flow into a platform with 4 care services, health records, medication reminders and an emergency SOS.
Bookings
Health records
Medication reminders
Emergency SOS
care services
in one platform
Overview
What is Praana? Healthcare that comes home
Strategy & Planning
Praana Health brings care out of the hospital. Doctor visits at home. Lab tests. Video consultations. Continuous monitoring for elderly patients, all connected to real clinics and real medical records.
Praana, built by Aarogya Tech, now serves the US market, with the platform live in outpatient clinics across several states, from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. I designed its earlier chapter: home care for families, with the team in India.
Works with Praana Edge, an FDA compliant vitals device
Integrated with clinic records over FHIR, eClinicalWorks and Athena
Design & Development
Brane Enterprises was hired to design and build the platform. I was one of three designers on a six person team, working alongside Praana's founders, practicing doctors, hospital managers and legal advisors.
The Challenge
The world is aging faster than its software
The world's over 60 population is on track to double by 2050, to more than two billion people. Most of them live apart from their grown children. So when something goes wrong, the person who worries most isn't in the room. They're in another city, on the phone, afraid.
What Praana had was a bare page for finding a doctor. No family accounts. No records. No way for a working daughter in one city to know if her father in another saw the doctor, took the medicine, or got his blood pressure checked.
"The person most anxious about a patient's health is usually not the patient. Our real user was the family."
Praana's previous generation: a tablet companion, and a bare booking flow.
01
Rebuild everything
New architecture, new visual language, new features. Nothing from the old app survived except the lesson.
02
Design for two generations
Adult children who pay for care. Elderly parents who receive it. One app that respects both.
03
Make it operable
Every promise on the family's screen needs a worker's tool behind it.
Research
Two users, one health record
Praana's doctors walked us through how care breaks down at home. Hospital staff told us about missed visits, unverifiable records and patients who couldn't describe their own symptoms. And Brane's research team chased the hardest question of all: what can a 70 year old actually do with a smartphone?
Americans are 65 or older. The demand.
US nursing roles go unfilled each year. The supply.
Aging demand, a shrinking care workforce. Designing for both the family and the worker was the only way to scale.
Caregiver runs the account
Children book, pay, and monitor. Parents receive care. The app had to serve both without confusing either.
Elders don't think in time slots
They think in morning and evening. Precision belongs to the operations team, not the patient.
A stranger at door is a real fear
Home healthcare only works if every visit can be proven. For the patient, and for the worker.
Persona 1
The long-distance caregiver
32, lives in a metro, books and monitors everything from the app. Wants proof, not promises.
Book Visits
Pays for the plan
Watches from afar
Needs verification and documentation
Persona 2
The parent
70+, may share a phone, needs big targets, familiar words, photos of real people, and a panic button that can't misfire.
Recieves the care
Answers the door
SOS Emergencies
Need basic digital literacy and a smartphone
The Decision
Ask "who is this for?" before anything else
That one answer decides everything downstream. Who owns the account. Whose vitals sit on the home screen. What tone the copy takes. Booking for yourself and booking for your father are different products wearing the same UI, so the fork gives each one honest defaults.
The trade: one extra screen before any value. One honest question is cheaper than a lifetime of wrong defaults.
The System
Every promise on the family's screen is a task on a worker's screen
We designed the service as a loop. A family books care in Praana Companion. Operations assigns a Field Health Manager. The FHM proves the visit at the door with an OTP in Praana Guide. Vitals and records flow back to the family and the clinic. Reminders keep everything alive between visits.
Family App
Family books care. Member, service and time of day
Operations
FHM assigned. A real Health Manager with a face, not a ticket
At the Door
OTP verified visit. Proof for the patient, proof for the worker.
Care Team App
Vitals captured. BP, glucose, SpO2 recorded on the spot
Records
Family and Clinic. Structured records flow to app and EMR
Reminders, medication schedules and alerts keep the loop running between visits
Service Loop
One booking, two apps, a verified loop of care
Home healthcare
Lab diagnostics
In clinic consultation
Video consultation
The Scope
Everything the two apps do
One file, 1,339 frames, two shipped apps. Here is the whole territory first. Then I will walk you into the rooms that mattered most.
The family app. Warm green, for anxious relatives.
The field app. Clinical blue, for professional workers.
The family app. Warm green, for anxious relatives.
The field app. Clinical blue, for professional workers.
The Family App: Praana Companion
Book care for your parents in four taps
We designed the service as a loop, not a screen. A family books care in Praana Companion. Operations assigns a Field Health Manager. The FHM proves the visit at the door with an OTP in Praana Guide. Vitals and records flow back to the family and the clinic. Reminders keep everything alive between visits.
Booking · Core Flow
No 15 minute slot grids. Morning, afternoon, evening.
Choose the member, choose the service, pick a day. Then, instead of a grid of time slots, pick a time of day: early hours, morning, afternoon or evening, each with its own little sun or moon. The research told us what elders could handle. We moved the precision to the operations side, where it belongs.
Text
The Decision
Times of day, not time slots for?" before anything else
Elders think in morning and evening, not 10:15. A slot grid creates false precision, and false precision creates cancellations and confusion at the door. So the picker only asks what the patient can truly answer. Exact scheduling moved to the team that owns the calendar anyway.
The shipped picker. Four windows with their own sky, and Early Hours quietly disabled once the day has moved past it.
The trade: families give up minute level certainty at booking. The confirmed time arrives once a health manager is assigned. Precision when it exists, not before.
Text
Text
Every kind of care through one door
The four service lines are the headline, but the catalogue runs deeper. Ambulance. Hospitalization. Vaccinations. Nutrition programs. Video consultations fan out into specialisms, and every doctor comes with a face and a specialization.
A nurse visit, a blood test and an ambulance all follow the same rhythm: member, service, time. Every booking lands in one hub under three words a family understands. Upcoming. Completed. Pending.
The trade: no shortcuts for power users. The least confident user sets the bar.
One profile per parent
Every family member gets a card. Age, plan, pending check ups, last visit. One glance answers the question every child asks: is everything on track?
Text
Text
Text
Text
Records that survive the visit
Health records, vitals history, documents from every visit. Organized per member, shareable with doctors. The memory of a family's health, kept in one place.
Structured forms, not photo dumps
Vitals enter as typed fields with units, Not photographed slips. The data has to survive the trip into hospital records over FHIR, and structure at the point of entry is what makes a record medical instead of a scrapbook.
The trade: slower than snapping a photo. Documents still attach for everything else.
Between visits: reminders and habits
Medication reminders for each member. A daily check in that earns points. A gentle feed of mobility and meditation content. Care doesn't only happen when someone visits. The app keeps the routine alive in between.
One plan, the whole family
Care here is bought per family, not per user. One plan covers up to six members. That matches how these households actually pay: one working child sponsors everyone, grandparents included.
And the points above do quiet work too.
They give a parent a small reason to open the app on days when nobody visits.
SOS · Core Flow
When something goes wrong
I designed the SOS flow. A three second countdown with a big number and one thumb sized button that says I'm Safe. Then alerts go out at once, to emergency contacts and the family circle. The countdown is the design. Elderly hands misfire. A false alarm that can't be cancelled teaches people to fear the button they need most.
Praana's previous generation: a tablet companion, and a bare booking flow.
The Decision
Three seconds to cancel
Elderly hands misfire. The countdown makes a false alarm free, because I'm Safe is the biggest thing on the screen. Pressing SOS never becomes something to fear. An alarm you're afraid to trigger is an alarm that fails.
The trade: a real emergency waits three extra seconds. We traded three seconds for a lifetime of trust in the button.
The Decision
Addresses, not just phone numbers
SOS setup asks every emergency contact for a location on a map. When the alert fires, who is nearest matters as much as who picks up. The same alert lands with the family and in the care team's emergency queue at the same moment, and the sequence ends in a live call, not just a notification.
The care team app · Praana Guide
The app for the person who shows up
Praana's Field Health Managers spend their day moving between homes. Their app shipped as Praana Guide, built around one word: today. Today's visits, today's emergencies, and the fastest path from I'm at the door to visit recorded.
Praana's previous generation: a tablet companion, and a bare booking flow.
01
The day at a glance
Visit counts, the emergency queue, and a schedule ordered by time and place. Nothing that needs interpreting during a busy situation.
02
Trust at the door
A visit starts only when the worker enters an OTP from the patient's phone. Both sides get proof. The family knows who came. The worker can show they were there.
03
Real jobs, real tools
Bulk vitals. Bookings made on a patient's behalf. Leave requests. Patient handovers. Unglamorous screens that decide whether the service actually works.
The unglamorous shelf
Recording vitals for a whole queue. Booking for someone who can't. Handing a patient to a colleague without losing their history. And beyond the visits: shift check in with working hours, leave with statements, expenses, and an escalation path with reopen states. Guide treats its workers as employees with careers, not gig tasks.
Praana's previous generation: a tablet companion, and a bare booking flow.
The Decision
Proof over convenience: an OTP at the door
A GPS ping can lie, and it asks the family to trust silence. An OTP read from the patient's phone means both people agreed the visit began. The family gets a verified event. The worker gets evidence of presence.
The trade: ten awkward seconds at the door, and it assumes the phone is at hand. Worth it. Verification is the product.
Also on the board
Beyond the two shipped apps we explored a third surface, a tool for staff and partners to manage customer records on Praana's behalf. It stayed an exploration. It still sharpened how we thought about who else touches this data.
Praana's previous generation: a tablet companion, and a bare booking flow.
The Craft
Two apps, two temperatures
The family app had to calm an anxious relative, so it runs warm. Green and cream, soft contrast, real faces on every screen. It should feel like care, not equipment. The field app is the opposite, on purpose. Praana Guide is clinical blue, dense with numbers, built for a professional moving fast between homes. One design system, two temperatures, because the two users could not be more different.
Praana Companion
The family app. Warm green, for anxious relatives.
Praana Guide
The field app. Clinical blue, for professional workers.
Evolution
From Tab to phone
2023 · the tablet era
Early family direction, loyal to old brand
Shipped, built for elderly trust
We rejected the paint, not the plan
This is the family app's early navy skin, before it found its green. Put it next to the shipped home: quick actions, member cards, check up counters, even the emergency banner. The bones are identical. The structure had earned its place through research.
Navy and violet read as gadget. Teal and cream read as care. That one change in temperature is most of what trust means visually in this product.
Early family direction
Shipped
The Design System
Shipped in style
Two apps and hundreds of screens hold together because we wrote the system down and I co built it: a teal color ramp, Poppins for voice and Inter for information, button and input states including error and disabled, navigation patterns, an icon set. And, unusually, rules for photography, because pictures of real elders and caregivers are part of this UI, not decoration.
Teal acts,
Cream informs,
Red interrupts
Poppins
Poppins
Poppins
Inter
Inter
Inter
Inter
Two voices of type
Words people already know
Button
Styles
Radium 16px
Action button
Action button
Action button
Action button
disabled
Default
disabled
Default
Icons
?
Accessibility
Built to be read by 70-year-old eyes
For this user, accessibility isn't a checklist at the end. It's the whole point. So I audited it where it scales best: the design system itself, checked against WCAG, not just the finished screens.
Text contrast against the page background
Foam · headings
16.7:1
Cream · labels
12.2:1
Teal · actions
7.8:1
Mist · body text
6.9:1
Alarm · SOS
6.0:1
WCAG AA passes at 4.5 to 1 for text. The lowest pair in the whole system is 6 to 1. Real ratios, from the shipped palette.
9/9
Core pairs pass WCAG AA
16.7:1
Headings on the background
6:1
Lowest pair, still above AA
1
Red screen, reserved for SOS
One question per screen. Buttons sit right where thumbs naturally rest.
Real photos and names. Trust starts with seeing a real human face.
Simple, direct labels. Easy to understand in any language.
Text always accompanies color. Meanings and warnings are never missed.
Large, spacious text and familiar words for easy reading.
Instant feedback for every action. No dead ends.
Outcome
Shipped, live, and in daily use
A case study that only celebrates is a brochure. Auditing every frame turned up real misses, and each one changed how I design now. Some are small and humbling: final frames shipped with typos, and one screen shows four identical placeholder members. Design QA is now a stage in my process, not a hope.
1,000+
Frames designed across two shipped apps and a documented design system
Built and documented Praana's first design system components and usage guidelines
care services
in one platform
Bookings
Health records
Medication reminders
Emergency SOS
Connected to Praana Edge, an FDA compliant device, and clinic records over FHIR
Four months, two apps, live on both stores, now carrying real visits, real vitals and real families every day.
An early App Store reviewer described catching borderline blood pressure within two weeks of monitoring. That is exactly the earlier detection Praana was founded for
Looking Back
What this project taught me
For this user, accessibility isn't a checklist at the end. It's the whole point. So I audited it where it scales best: the design system itself, checked against WCAG, not just the finished screens.
Design the service, not the app
The family app is only credible because the worker app delivers on it. I learned to design the whole loop.
Constraints are the brief
An elder must use this without help. That one constraint produced better, more original UI decisions than any moodboard.
Execution is a skill
Working from stakeholder decisions taught me to turn requirements into screens fast, and to know which details were mine to fight for.
What I'd do next: phone and OTP login so the front door matches the users, one scheduling language across booking and rescheduling, the designed AI support desk shipped with medical guardrails, vitals streaming straight from the Edge device, Hindi and Telugu for real, and voice first booking for elders.