CONVERSATION-BASED TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

Bento Flare started as an honest conversation about how much we, as patients, dislike health monitoring surveys that ask too many questions and take our time for granted.

Living with lupus is a game of whac-a-mole. All your organs are vulnerable to an autoimmune disease process, and it is hard to forecast which constellation of symptoms will strike and “flare up” on any particular day. When we visit our rheumatologist only once or twice a year, it’s easy to have recollection errors.

We imagined a consumer-grade mobile experience that would eliminate the burden of reporting symptoms everyday and provide quantified outcomes and real time return of value for all stakeholders — patients, physician-scientists, clinical investigators, clinical trial sponsors, and caregivers.

From Prototype to Production

Bento Flare began with a lot of listening. To build a mobile application people would want to use, we had a lot of conversations with people living with lupus, patient advocates, rheumatologists, caregivers, regulators, diversity experts. We also had a lot of conversations with builders — software engineers, security experts, game makers and toy designers. To achieve an awesome user experience, we have translated the patient voice into new features, and we expanded from Apple iOS to Android.

Co-Created with Patients

The Patient Engagement team at Lupus Therapeutics tapped into their lupus community to select a group of individuals with diverse age, race and ethnicity, geographic location, lupus diagnosis and disease severity to provide feedback on Bento Flare. Several of these individuals have had experience speaking to the improvement of various clinical trial designs and materials. The lupus community has been involved in the creative process with Bento Flare and continues to remain an integral partner in this effort to build digital tools that reduce patient burden for symptom diaries and patient reporting outcome measures (PROMs). To learn more about participating in the lupus drug development process with Lupus Therapeutics, please click here.

Co-Created with Clinical Investigators

Physicians and Principal Investigators from the Lupus Clinical Investigators Network (LuCIN), a clinical trial network of academic medical centers formed by the Lupus Research Alliance, also helped design Bento Flare and ensure patient accessibility and clinical utility as an electronic Clinical Outcome Assessment (eCOA).

Play-to-Learn Model

The Bento Flare mobile application offers task completion games that promote disease education about druggable targets. An example of this is the B cell spinner, where users will spin B cell and receive educational information about the antigen or receptor they land on.

Additionally, the Bento Flare mobile application offers a Play-to-Earn model with engaging gamified components and rewarding task incentives. In the case of the B cell spinner, users will spin the B cell and receive tokens for completing tasks. These tokens can be redeemed for a variety of rewards, from gift cards to crypto.

First Principles

Today, the Bento Flare mobile application is a modern symptom diary, health survey and pharmacovigilance tool designed with three First Principles in mind:

• Respect for Your Privacy. When you download Bento Flare and log in for the first time, you are only asked your birth year, not your birth date nor your birth month. This represents our commitment to respect your privacy and protect your identity.

• Respect for Your Time. Play-to-learn games make it fun to learn about the biological mechanisms of inflammation and ‘druggable targets’ in investigational new drugs. These play-to-learn design principles are coupled with play-to-earn tokens so that your contributions (patient-reported symptoms and outcomes) yield real-time microrewards.

• Respect for Your Voice. Bento Flare values the Voice of the Customer and wants to make sure we are building out a system that people will enjoy and continue to use. The Bento team values your feedback and wants to hear from you anytime that is convenient for you. There are three ways to make suggestions and request help:

  • Send us an email: support@bentobio.com

  • Give us a call 24/7: (855) 440-2055

  • Start a conversation in Discord Chat: Join here.