Brisbane-based start-up Lovara & Co has launched an AI-enabled medication and health management app developed after co-founder Roel Wijmans survived a cardiac arrest and two strokes.

Zelia allows users to track medications and symptoms, record vital signs, draw health data from Apple Health and compile a summary to share with their GP or specialist before an appointment.

Mr Wijmans said, “Nearly a year ago I had a cardiac arrest, and it was thirty minutes before I was revived, followed two weeks later by a double stroke. Coming home from hospital, I couldn’t find an app that helped me manage my medications, check interactions, or prepare for specialist appointments, so I built one myself.”

Mr Wijmans founded the app with Elizabeth Smith after they found themselves navigating a set of questions that no one had prepared them for:

 · On eight or more medications a day, neither the patient nor their carer could be certain every morning that everything had been taken.

· Food and drug interactions are clinically significant but almost impossible to navigate without professional help on demand — “nobody hands you a guide at discharge”.

· Exercise is important for recovery, but for someone with an ICD there is genuine uncertainty about what is safe without real-time guidance.

· Questions for the cardiologist accumulated between appointments. By the time they arrived, half were forgotten — or asked in a rushed, incomplete way.

· Elizabeth, alongside Roel, was helping to manage medications, appointments, and the anxiety of watching Roel navigate an entirely new body. Her information needs were as real as his — but almost entirely unaddressed.

Zelia features

The iPhone and iPad app uses Anthropic’s Claude model to provide plain-language health information and help users record information conversationally. Lovara says the app does not diagnose, prescribe or recommend treatment changes and is not registered as a medical device.

The app’s main features are:

• Medication and symptom management: including dose logging, adherence and refill tracking, interaction checks, and conversational logging of vital signs and symptoms.
• Appointment preparation: with 12-week trend charts and a shareable summary covering medications, adherence, symptoms, vital signs and questions for the treating clinician.
• Privacy-focused AI support: using Claude to provide plain-language health information while storing health records on the user’s device rather than in a central cloud database.

Mr Wijmans said, “The result is a product shaped by genuine first-hand understanding of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of serious illness, not just an observer of it.

Co-founder Elizabeth Smith said, “We built the app we both wished had existed. Not just for Roel as the patient — but for me, standing next to him, trying to hold everything together and not always knowing if I was getting it right.”