MySkinSelfie

About the App

I developed MySkinSelfie in collaboration with Consultant Dermatologist Dr Philip Hampton. The app makes it easier for patients living with skin conditions to keep track of how how they change over time, by assisting in taking consistent photographs of their skin through an overlay system.

Photos are organised by date, condition type and location on the body, making it easier to track how they change over time through notes and a side-by-side comparison tool. Taken images are stored in the cloud over a secure connection, meaning patients can access them across multiple devices over periods of months or years - perfect for long-term condition tracking.

All uploaded files are encrypted, meaning that patients can be safe in the knowledge that no-one will get their hands on their sensitive images. Photos deliberately kept out of your device’s default image gallery in order to avoid potential embarrassment, and users even have the option to lock the application or individual photo albums behind a PIN.

The mobile applications were developed in Xamarin Forms, with the REST server running Web API 2.0. Because the whole project is written in C#, each component can share common code and be opened from the same Visual Studio solution. MySkinSelfie is open-source, and can be downloaded from my GitHub.

MySkinSelfie as a HCI Research Project

The research goal of MySkinSelfie was to investigate if technology-assisted patient-self monitoring—in combination with traditional healthcare systems—could be used to ease the burden of unnecessary patient referrals upon both the patients themselves and the UK’s underfunded National Health Service. The application was deployed within several NHS practices within the North of England, with it being recommended to patients living with applicable skin conditions. As well as an ongoing study within the NHS, several evaluations have been undertaken and published. These evaluations showed that patients not only found MySkinSelfie easy to use, but also genuinely useful for tracking the progress of their skin conditions over time.

Resulting Publications

• Evaluation of MySkinSelfie: A New Mobile App for Patient Skin Self-Monitoring

  Philip Hampton, Dan Richardson, Kyle Montague, Patrick Olivier

  2017 | Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology | DOI

• Usability Testing of MySkinSelfie: a Mobile Phone Application for Skin Self‐Monitoring

  P Hampton, D Richardson, S Brown, C Goodhead, K Montague, P Olivier

  2019 | Clinical and Experimental Dermatology | DOI