At an Orlando Health meeting with officials seeking ideas from staff to potentially back, Jen Foley had doubts about whether she should pitch her idea.
Her idea was a rough outline, at best, and she did not have a tech business background or experience in developing an app.
As the meeting pressed on, however, Foley did something many who now use her Arthur app cannot: she spoke up.
“The more ideas I heard, the more I said to myself, ‘I’m going to just put it out there,’” said Foley, an Orlando Health brand manager. “That was the best thing I could have done.”
Foley has since been working with a team to develop Arthur, an app that helps those with limited ability to speak or gesture communicate their needs.
To do that, the app offers simple buttons with specific commands, such as answering yes or no, communicating pain levels or asking attending nurses about room conditions.
In addition, a keyboard allows for text message-like conversations.
The idea stemmed from Foley’s inability to communicate with her father, the application’s namesake, following surgery.
It led to an exchange during which Arthur slumped his shoulders, defeated.
The frustration and feelings of helplessness escalated when family wasn’t around.
To help, Jen Foley made a physical ABC chart that included common phrases.
At one point, Arthur was able to communicate his needs simply by pointing to letters, in succession: G-L-A-S-S-E-S.
“To have this little bit of control over being able to help him because he could tell us what was going on was a relief,” she said. “It’s palpable.”
The Apple Store app has been in development in collaboration with the Orlando Health Foundry.
The Foundry gives employees a venue to share ideas.
The hospital system uses it as a way to discover potential investable products or services.
“They are brilliant in the way they are building these innovative ideas,” said Carl Pfeiffer, Arthur App’s chief operating officer. “They can tell you the viability of what will work and can connect you to contacts at both major hospital systems here.
“Bringing in people from the outside was really smart.”
Pfeiffer has been in the health industry for more than a decade.
He was on the team that built EASE, which provided families of surgery patients updates from the operating room.
“My passion has always been in finding spots in communication that are missing through the healthcare experience,” he said. “We are at this point now in technology where things are getting better.”
The use cases for the Arthur app have been expanding as more use and understand it.
Hospital units, a rehabilitation center and a skilled nursing facility have explored its use, as have emergency rooms with non-verbal patients.
“We have seen patients’ eyes light up when they regain their ability to communicate using the Arthur App,” Melissa Morales, nursing operations manager of the neuroscience intensive care unit at Orlando Health Orlando Regional Medical Center, said in a press release earlier this summer. “Their loved ones are relieved and it takes the guesswork out of providing excellent healthcare.”
The more word gets out about the application, the more Pfeiffer says he has heard from other hospital systems who want to adopt it.
As she pitched her idea, Foley came up with the name Arthur as a sort of placeholder.
Naturally, it was the first name that came to mind but she never expected it to stick, she said.
However, now that it has become official, Foley says it would have been strange otherwise.
“To see it come to life has been fantastic,” she said. “Initially in the name, I expected to do what’s best for the app. Now that it stuck, I hear my dad’s name so often and it’s touching.”