[MUSIC PLAYING]
GAURAV SHAH: The day Aamani was born,
we were very excited to meet our daughter.
DANICA SHAH: Her birth was supposed to go as normal.
It was a very normal pregnancy.
GAURAV SHAH: I mean, I look back and it
is the happiest day of my life and the scariest day
of my life, all wrapped up in a 24 hour period.
When she was born, they can't get her oxygen level higher
than about 80% to 85%, and they said
it has to be in the high 90s.
They decided that they're going to take her to the ICU,
or NICU.
They told me she has a heart condition,
and she had open heart surgery.
At six weeks, Aamani finally came home.
She might have been in the home setting,
but she brought the hospital with us.
DANICA SHAH: First year of her life, it was pretty grueling.
She had her cardiologist, general surgeon,
ophthalmologist, a physical therapist, a feeding
specialist, and an allergist.
GAURAV SHAH: It felt like she had more providers
than most people would have in their lifetime.
DANICA SHAH: Just thinking to myself,
when is it all going to stop?
We found out about her eyes, and we
needed to start patching to help strengthen the eye so that it
did not develop into amblyopia, or lazy eyes,
as it's commonly called.
Patching shuts off vision to one eye
so that the other eye can get stronger.
GAURAV SHAH: We had to keep track of how many hours
a day she was being patched.
I would ask Danica everyday, hey, did you patch Aamani?
And I felt bad asking that question knowing that Danica
was already overwhelmed.
I thought, let me try to use what
I know to be able to influence the future,
even if it's in a tiny, small way.
PatchMe was an idea to help us communicate
better so that we could share information about the patching
schedule.
Right around the same time frame,
being a software architect, I saw this new technology
called Flutter.
It helped me to connect the dots to say, hey, I want to do this.
I would wait till Aamani was in bed
and then take maybe an hour or two a night.
I saw the Udemy course by App Brewery in collaboration
with the Google team, so I felt like that was the right way
to learn Flutter.
Over the years, I've worked on all kinds of stuff,
but Flutter has been the framework that I've
been productive in the fastest.
I was able to make Patch Me in a short time.
ANDREA AMESTOV: The awesome thing about the Patch Me app
is that it now give some very objective information to give
to the care providers, where before sometimes you
underestimate or overestimate it.
GAURAV SHAH: We realized that there
is a need for this outside of our home.
I decided that I should publish it to the app store.
ANDREA AMESTOV: My hope is it will definitely
spread throughout the US for all, even the world.
GAURAV SHAH: Flutter allowed me to create Patch Me
without having to sacrifice on either the app
and its functionality or my family and my time
with my family.
DANICA SHAH: What the app gave back to me
was a lot of control.
I have the best life partner.
And certainly children with special needs,
it can either create a distance between parents
or it can draw them closer.
And I'm very happy it brought us closer.
GAURAV SHAH: You know, Aamani has overcome so much
in her short life.
All the pictures when we look back at it,
we see how fragile she was.
And you look at her today as a baby, and she's a daredevil.
She is determined and headstrong.
And my hope for Aamani is that she continues to thrive
and we as a family continue to thrive.
She has changed me to the core.
Now I want to spend my time in a productive way
to be able to give back, and Aamani has taught me that.