NHS Heart age

The brief

Antbits was tasked with adapting the heart age calculation from a defunct web tool created for Cambridge University, there was no documentation or guidance available. The original source code was in Adobe Flex and only partly working.

Technical response

I was able to recreate the original calculation, fix inherent errors within it and incorporate it into a much improved interface, this was no easy task and had to be clinically signed off by the academics responsible for original Heart age research.

The original project required a way of measuring social deprivation, I was able to improve this from a simple five point scale to a full national postcode lookup integrating the Townsend index of deprivation from the ONS into a bespoke API.

The completed tool predicted life expectancy, heart age and risk of death and allowed users to compare these figures against interventions such as losing weight and quitting smoking.

I was responsible for the maintenance and development of multiple iterations of this tool over a 9 year period, involving several media campaigns and NHS site architecture changes.

Legacy

Due to internal policy changes NHS Digital has ceased using external contractors and as a result has retired or rebuilt all our original tools to run server side with decreased functionality. The demo below is the most recent iteration that I worked on.