The Digital Buddy App

The Digital Buddy, developed by and for people with MS, helps people with  MS with information, stories, community and tools to deal with the impact of their disease by focussing on lifestyle adjustments in a positive way. It’s based of studies on patient perspective during a 10-year period. The Digital Buddy  includes the bigger picture of lifestyle that is involved with a chronic disease on a daily basis. The Digital Buddy motivates MS patients by means of positive coaching to improve the personal situation and lifestyle one step at a time.

How does the Digital Buddy help you?

The are a number of ways  the Digital Buddy can help  you to improve your quality of life with MS:

• Knowledge sharing. Through our Knowledge Center users can find a lot of information related to MS. This also includes a lot of personal stories of people that have and MS, how the cope with their disease, hints and tips, etc.
• The Digital Buddy Community. This social network is only available for Digital Buddy users. Use it to share your personal stories, recipes, hints and tips to deal with MS, etc. But you  can also use  this platform to set  up groups that are only accessible for you, your  family  and e.g. your doctors, so you  can discuss  your specific situation.
  You can create friendships, maintain you  own timeline, and chat with others.
• Change behavior. Through  the so-called Tiny Habits, the Digital Buddy helps user to change their behavior, through small, easy to follow challenges. It is a proven method, that is fully incorporated in the Digital Buddy. Use the pre-defined ones, or create you own Tiny Habits
• Participate in Events or Research. Through the  Digital Buddy you can find many events that take place (e.g. webinars that cover MS topics, sports activities targeted at  people with MS, and more), or researches that are  announced in which you can participate.
• And more.

 

 

Collaboration with third parties

We work closely with universities, pharmaceutical companies and research  institutes, to share data from people that have MS, in order to get a better understanding of MS, to create better food supplements, to improve MS treatment, etc. All of this is done with the explicit  consent of the user: the user owns their own data, and we can only use and/or share it with their consent.

Data collection

The Digital Buddy collects data in several ways, all of them controlled by  the user:

• Users can enter profile information, that provides more detail about the specifics of MS and the user (what medication is used, food supplements used, diet, treatments, etc.).
• Through questionnaires, users can participate in various research that is done by external parties.
• Users can integrate their wearables (a Fitbit, their smartwatch, etc.)  to collect additional information and combine that with their other Digital Buddy data. That way, there is a more accurate profile, you can use that data to define more specific Tiny Habit, the data  can be used for research, etc. All meant to improve the quality of liife of people with MS, and to give  the research community more and more detailed data to work with.
  This integration is done by integrating  with Google Fit (on Android devices) or Apple Health (on iOS devices)

And we can’t stress  this enough: all the data belongs to the  users! And that date is only used if the users give explicit consent to use their data!

Download  the Digital Buddy app: