MyHeartHealth wins Rep. Beth Van Duyne’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 24th District

When asked what inspired the creation of MyHeartHealth, Tristan Sun said, “My grandmother takes medication every day to control her high blood pressure (BP). Even though the medicine helps reduce her home BP readings into the normal range, the measurements taken at the clinic always come back anomalously high. Thus, it’s crucial for her to monitor her BP at home and show the numbers to the doctor.

“My grandmother logs her BP in a little spiral notebook. Day after day, year after year, the numbers march across the page, written carefully in blue ink. I think her diligence—always wondering whether a stressful day or a salty meal might have caused a spike—reflects how she wishes to stay healthy. This daily ritual is her way of taking control of her health. Every few months, she brings the notebook to the clinic, where her doctor quickly flips through the pages, nods, and moves on. When she gets home, she tells me, ‘He barely looked.’

“It was heartbreaking to see my grandmother’s effort go unnoticed. She does her best, yet her logs are intractable because doctors can’t interpret endless pages of raw numbers. I wanted to help her take control of her health. I started researching hypertension, finding that out of the 120+ million Americans struggling with it, nearly all of them still rely on pen and paper. Meanwhile, I discovered that appointments only last around fifteen minutes, meaning that doctors don’t have time to read raw numbers.

“That’s why I created MyHeartHealth. I wanted a simple layout without any confusing menus because I had seen a statistic from AARP about the paucity of older adults who believe today’s technology is designed with them in mind—and I needed MyHeartHealth to be accessible to older adults. Thus, I designed the app so that users only have to point their phone at the BP monitor. This is significantly easier than fiddling with Bluetooth or manually typing numbers into the keyboard. The app’s AI extracts the numbers, saves them automatically, and compiles a concise one-page summary that doctors can understand at a glance.

“When I showed her the prototype, she smiled and said, ‘Now he’ll have time to look.’ That elated me. MyHeartHealth bridges the gap between how patients record data and how doctors understand it.”