My daily heart check
2 minutes each morning. After you pee, before you eat. Same scale, same clothes.
1Weigh yourself
2How do you feel today?
Tap the body or the list. Choose all that are new or worse.
Why this works
- Heart failure zone tools. Green / yellow / red self-check tools are widely used in heart failure programs (for example, patient materials from the American Heart Association and many hospitals). Daily weights catch fluid build-up before it becomes an emergency.
- Clear action, not just information. Every zone ends in exactly what to do now, with the button to do it. That is what PEMAT “actionability” measures.
- Not color alone. Each zone has a shape and a word (circle, triangle, stop sign), so it works for people with color-vision differences (WCAG 1.4.1).
- Pictures + words together (Mayer’s multimedia principles). The body map shows where to look; the list says the same thing in words.
- Caregiver loop. Sending today’s result to a family member adds social support, which helps people keep up daily self-care.
Behavior Change Techniques (BCT Taxonomy v1): 2.3 Self-monitoring of behavior2.4 Self-monitoring of outcome(s) of behavior1.4 Action planning4.1 Instruction on how to perform the behavior3.1 Social support (unspecified)8.3 Habit formation
COM-B target: Psychological capability (knowing warning signs), Physical opportunity (one-tap call), Automatic motivation (a daily morning habit).
Persona tuned for: “James, 67” — heart failure, discharged last week, lives alone, his daughter checks in by phone. Reads at about a 6th-grade level.
How HealthLiteracyCopilot would make it: HealthLiteracyCopilot would produce the copy from the care team’s own zone thresholds (the numbers come from the clinical protocol, never from AI). It would be checked with an adapted PEMAT actionability rubric and the CDC Clear Communication Index, and a simulated “James” reader (a simulated participant, not a patient) is asked: “Your weight went up 3 pounds since yesterday. What do you do?” to find questions for human review. It does not diagnose: the zone follows the care team’s own action plan, and red always means call 911.
What a pilot would measure: days with a check-in; yellow-zone calls made the same day; 30-day readmissions for heart failure. Measures a pilot would track, not results or promised effects.