urgência agora

Inspired by the challenges people face during urgent medical situations, Urgência Agora was created to make emergency healthcare information more accessible, understandable, and less stressful. The project started from a simple observation: during moments of urgency, people often struggle to quickly find reliable information about hospital wait times and emergency room availability. Existing solutions lacked clarity, real time visibility, and a user experience designed around stressful decision making.

Urgência Agora started from a simple problem: in Portugal, people often struggle to quickly understand which hospitals have the shortest emergency room wait times, especially during stressful or urgent situations. Existing information was either difficult to access, unclear, or not designed around the real experience of someone needing fast guidance.

Over 3 weeks, I designed and built Urgência Agora, a native iOS app focused on making Portuguese emergency room information more accessible, understandable, and useful in real time. What made this project unique was that I had zero prior experience with Swift or Xcode before starting.

I began by researching the SNS 24 ecosystem and studying the public hospital data provided by the Portuguese National Health Service. Understanding how emergency room wait times, Manchester triage categories, and hospital flows worked was essential before thinking about the product experience itself.

From there, I designed the full UI and user experience in Figma, focusing on clarity, speed, and reducing stress during urgent moments. The goal was to help users quickly compare hospitals, understand waiting times, and make faster decisions without feeling overwhelmed.

To bring the app to life, I used Claude (Anthropic’s AI) as a pair programmer throughout the entire development process. Claude guided me step by step through Swift and Xcode, helping translate the designs into a fully functional native iOS application. This completely changed the way I approached problem solving and learning, allowing me to go from zero technical knowledge to a working product in just a few weeks.

The final app included real time SNS emergency room wait times, live hospital rankings, Manchester triage breakdowns, an AI health assistant called Lusia, favourites, bilingual support, and Apple Maps integration for directions.

More than just building an app, this project demonstrated my ability to quickly learn new systems, combine design thinking with AI assisted development, and turn a complex public health problem into a user centered digital product in a very short timeframe.