Breast cancer is commonly detected through nine key symptoms. However, women in New Zealand, and indeed all over the world, are usually told to just look for “lumps.” As a result, 98% of women aren’t aware of all the different symptoms.

If changes in their breasts are overlooked or ignored, this leads to later stage diagnosis of breast cancer. And the fatality rates of late stage diagnosis are significantly higher.

Despite years of education from the Breast Cancer Foundation in New Zealand, women still didn’t know what to self-check for, beyond a simple lump. Our challenge was not just to get women regularly checking their breasts, but knowing what to check for.

In New Zealand, there’s a stigma around breasts and therefore breast health. It’s hard to change behaviour through normal healthcare communications, like pamphlets in your doctor’s surgery and posters in bathrooms. And teaching people how to feel their own breasts was somewhat taboo. We believed an app-based solution could begin to overcome this.

Introducing Pre Check: a multisensory training tool that reproduced the feelings of early stage breast cancer through your phone screen.

Pre Check uses haptic technology to create unique vibration sequences that, when combined with audio and visual cues, teach your hands how to look for breast cancer. In doing so, the app allowed women to simply feel around their phone screen looking for abnormalities - just as they would their own breast.

One in nine women in New Zealand will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime, so our target audience really was all women. Although breast cancer is more prevalent in older women, we know that if we can teach thorough self-checking behaviours early, women are more likely to establish lifelong habits.

To establish these habits, we looked at the things we touch all the time - our phones. Tapping away on them 2000 times a day, we turned that unconscious behaviour into a personalised, private experience that works to create routine self-checks.

Pre Check reinvents the way we learn about breast cancer, from a passive education to an active experience. Not only did we create a tool for behaviour change, we also enabled women to set up personalised reminders, so that self-checking would become part of their routine.

Pre Check uses haptic technology to create unique vibration sequences that, when combined with audio and visual cues, teach your hands how to look for breast cancer. The interface was designed to closely emulate a real self-check, so both the UI and UX needed to feel as organic as possible. To do this, we mapped 269 touch points over nine 3D surfaces - each triggering unique touch or audio feedbacks. This is a mobile first initiative, which meant we did extensive tests to ensure the haptics were consistent across Android and Apple devices.

Pre Check has been seen by more than half of the New Zealand population.

It became the #1 Health App in New Zealand.

And women aren’t just downloading it and forgetting - they’re actively using it, with the average user detecting seven symptoms. Far more than just the ‘lump’ they knew to look for previously.

This education has the potential to prevent 10,000 late stage diagnoses and the death of 650 NZ women every year.