A friendly, personalised hybrid app guiding parents through their child’s critical early years.
What we did
- Hybrid Mobile App Development
- UI/UX Design & "Journey" Mapping
- Personalisation Logic Engine
- Social Media Integration
- Push Notification Systems
- Video & Media Optimisation
About the project
The early years of a child's life are foundational. From birth to starting school, the daily interactions a child has with their parents, active play, chatting, and visual stimulation, literally wire their brain for future learning. The Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT) recognised a need to support parents during this critical period. They envisaged a digital companion that would offer friendly, clinically-backed advice to support a child’s intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development.
Tinderhouse was commissioned to bring this vision to life through the "Born to Move" app. The project’s core philosophy was to encourage daily active play and interaction, framing the development process not as a checklist, but as a "journey." We worked closely with the health visiting team to translate their clinical expertise into an accessible, engaging mobile experience.
The resulting application serves as a comprehensive guide for parents of pre-school aged children across Kent. By combining the trust of the NHS with the convenience of mobile technology, we created a tool that empowers parents to build the foundations for a healthy, happy, and confident child. The app remains a vital part of the Trust's digital offering, still actively maintained and used in 2026.
The Challenge
While the clinical advice was readily available within the Trust, delivering it effectively to busy, often sleep-deprived parents presented several challenges. KCHFT needed a solution that was more engaging than a leaflet but less rigid than a medical textbook.
The specific hurdles included:
- Information Overload: Parents are often bombarded with conflicting advice. The app needed to cut through the noise with clear, stage-specific guidance.
- Engagement: Promoting active play required an interface that was itself lively and engaging, avoiding dry blocks of text.
- Accessibility: The tool needed to be accessible to a wide demographic, requiring an intuitive user interface that worked seamlessly across both phones and tablets.
- Personal Connection: Generic advice often fails to resonate. The challenge was to make the app feel personal to each specific child and their unique developmental timeline.
- Navigation Logic: With three distinct developmental pillars (Speech, Activity, Vision) across multiple age ranges (Prenatal to School Age), the information architecture had to be robust yet simple to navigate.
Our Solution
To meet these challenges, Tinderhouse developed a sophisticated hybrid application that prioritised user experience and personalisation. We structured the app around the concept of a "Journey," guiding parents through specific milestones or “stepping stones.”
Hybrid Architecture for Broad Reach
To ensure maximum accessibility across the diverse range of devices used by Kent residents, we utilised hybrid app development. This approach allowed us to deploy a single, robust codebase to both iOS and Android platforms (supporting iOS 8+ and Android 5+). This strategy ensured feature parity and cost-effective maintenance, allowing the Trust to invest more budget into content and features rather than duplicate native development efforts.
Structured "Stepping Stones"
We organised the vast amount of clinical content into an intuitive navigation system. The app is divided into three key areas: ‘Chatter matters’, ‘Be active & independent’, and ‘Eyes need to move too’. Within each area, we implemented a pathway of development—from prenatal and newborn through to toddler and school age.
To validate this structure, we employed an MVP approach during the design phase. We prototyped the "stepping stone" format, comprising "What to do," "Why do it," and supporting media, to ensuring it was digestible for parents before full-scale development. This focus on MVP app development principles ensured the final information architecture was perfectly aligned with user needs.
Deep Personalisation Engine
We understood that parents engage more deeply when advice feels specific to them. We built a personalisation engine that allows users to create profiles for multiple children. The app dynamically inserts the child’s name into the advice text (e.g., "Put [Isabel] on her front"), transforming generic instructions into personal guidance. Furthermore, upon opening the app, the logic automatically directs the user to the section relevant to their child's current age (e.g., a 6-month-old), removing the friction of searching for relevant content.
Interactive Media & Social Sharing
To make the content dynamic, we integrated video subtitles and loading animations (such as bubbling effects or crawling babies) to maintain visual interest. We also recognised the pride parents feel in their children's milestones. We developed a custom photo feature allowing parents to upload images of their child's progress. These photos can be overlaid with the "Born to Move" branding and shared directly to social media platforms like WhatsApp, bridging the gap between a healthcare app and a lifestyle tool.
Proactive Engagement
To keep parents engaged over the years, we implemented a smart push notification system. This sends age-specific prompts and reminders, ensuring parents receive timely advice exactly when it is most relevant to their child's development stage.
The Results
Born to Move has established itself as a trusted digital resource for families in Kent. The project demonstrates the longevity and sustainability of well-architected hybrid solutions in the public sector.
Long-Term Sustainability: The app continues to be successfully used and maintained by Tinderhouse in 2026, proving the durability of the initial codebase and design.
Enhanced Parent Confidence: By breaking development down into manageable "stepping stones," parents report feeling less overwhelmed and more confident in supporting their child's growth.
Seamless Cross-Platform Utility: The hybrid approach successfully delivered a consistent, high-quality experience across both tablet and mobile devices for Android and iOS users.
Increased Content Reach: The integration of social sharing features has helped spread awareness of the KCHFT brand and the "Born to Move" message organically through user networks.
Multi-Child Support: The ability to manage multiple profiles (e.g., a newborn and a 2-year-old) simultaneously has made the app a staple for growing families.
Technical Highlights
Hybrid Framework for cross-platform iOS and Android deployment.
Dynamic Text Replacement for personalised user experience.
Local Storage Architecture to handle multiple user profiles securely.
Smart Push Notifications triggered by age-based logic.
Image Processing for branded social sharing overlays.
Video Integration with subtitle support for accessibility.
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