Somalens to Advance Inclusive Healthcare Through Technology, Says Co-founder Joy Bachashe Samuel

Less than a few months after its December 2025 launch, digital health platform Somalens is entering a new phase, with Co-founder and Product Designer Joy Bachashe Samuel championing a vision for healthcare technology that is more inclusive, accessible and engaging.

When Somalens officially launched in December 2025, the idea was bigger than simply putting another health application on people's phones. The team wanted to explore how technology could help ordinary people become more engaged with their everyday health, while creating an experience that felt approachable rather than intimidating.

Two months later, the young health-tech platform is already evolving.

At the centre of that evolution is Joy Bachashe Samuel, the Nigerian-born, UK-based Co-founder and Product Designer helping shape the product's experience, strategy and approach to inclusive digital healthcare.

Now, following the introduction of a new gamified experience on Somalens, Samuel believes the next chapter should be about making health technology not only smarter, but more inclusive.

“The future of digital healthcare cannot simply be about building more technology. It has to be about building technology that more people can actually understand, access and feel represented by,” Joy said.

From a December 2025 launch to a new Somalens

Somalens launched in December 2025 with a focus on providing users with digital tools to engage with their health and well-being on their phones, all powered by AI.

Since then, the product has continued to develop around a simple challenge: many people know they should pay more attention to their health, but maintaining everyday health habits can quickly become repetitive.

The latest Somalens experience attempts to address that problem by borrowing engagement principles more commonly associated with consumer technology.

Users can now encounter features including health missions, streaks, levels, SOMA Coins and rewards, alongside the platform's broader health-focused tools.

The idea is to give people visible signs of progress as they interact with their health.

For Joy, however, gamification is not about trivialising healthcare.

“Healthcare is serious, but the experience of taking care of yourself doesn't always have to feel heavy,” she said. “We started asking ourselves how we could make healthy actions feel rewarding enough that people actually want to keep coming back.”

The approach reflects a broader product philosophy at Somalens: digital health tools should fit more naturally into people's everyday lives rather than expecting users to fundamentally change their behaviour around technology.

Meet the woman helping design that experience

Joy's role in Somalens extends beyond the app's visual appearance

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As Co-founder and Product Designer, she works at the intersection of product thinking, user experience and business strategy, helping translate the company's health-tech ambitions into experiences people can understand and use.

Her background brings together technology, design and innovation. Her personal platform, Made With Joy, showcases her wider body of work and professional interests across product design, technology and innovation.

That multidisciplinary background has become particularly relevant as she works on a product operating in a sector where poor design can have consequences beyond users simply abandoning an app.

Health technology has to communicate clearly. It must consider different levels of digital and health literacy, avoid unnecessarily complicated experiences and recognise that the people using a product may come from vastly different backgrounds.

For Samuel, inclusion therefore has to begin during the design process, not after a product has already been built.

“Inclusive healthcare starts with recognising that there is no single type of user,” Samuel said. “People have different backgrounds, different levels of health knowledge and different relationships with technology. If we want digital health to reach more people, those differences have to influence how we design.”

Making healthcare feel less boring

That philosophy has inspired the bold campaign introducing Samuel as “the woman making healthcare feel less boring.”

The phrase is deliberately unconventional for healthcare.

But behind it is a genuine product challenge.

Many digital platforms have become exceptionally sophisticated at encouraging people to return every day. Social platforms have feeds, games have levels, fitness products have milestones and learning applications have streaks.

Somalens is exploring what some of those engagement mechanics could look like when redirected towards healthier behaviours.

Instead of a user's interaction ending after completing a health-related activity, the new experience can turn that action into part of a larger journey through missions, progress and rewards.

Samuel believes this can be particularly important for preventive and everyday health, where there may be no immediate medical event pushing someone to pay attention.

“We want people to feel that looking after their health is something they can actively participate in,” she said. “If someone can see their progress, build a streak or complete a health mission, that small sense of achievement can make the experience feel completely different.”

Building inclusive technology from an African perspective

Somalens' story is also part of a larger conversation about who gets to build the next generation of global health technology.

Joy Samuel's experience as a Nigerian technology professional now based in the United Kingdom gives her exposure to different technology ecosystems and user contexts.

That perspective matters.

Products designed for diverse populations must contend with differences in culture, access to healthcare, health literacy, digital confidence and even how people describe and understand their health.

For African technology founders in particular, building globally relevant products while remaining sensitive to local realities presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

Samuel sees inclusive product design as one way of bridging that gap.

The goal is not merely to make technology available to more people, but to question whether the experience itself has been designed with those people in mind.

From product designer to technology voice

Joy's ambitions also extend beyond building Somalens.

Her work increasingly intersects with conversations around artificial intelligence, responsible technology, digital representation and inclusive design, areas she has explored alongside her product-design career.

That makes her role at Somalens particularly significant: she is helping build a consumer technology product while simultaneously thinking about the wider implications of the technologies increasingly shaping people's lives.

It is a career trajectory that reflects a new generation of African technology professionals who are moving between disciplines rather than remaining within traditional job descriptions.

For Samuel, being a co-founder has meant moving beyond designing individual screens to thinking about the entire product: who it serves, what problems it solves, why people should trust it and what it could eventually become.

Eight months in, the bigger journey is only beginning

For a platform that only entered the market in December 2025, Somalens remains at an early stage.

But its evolution over its first eight months points towards a larger ambition.

The company wants to explore what happens when healthcare technology becomes more personalised, engaging and inclusive — without losing sight of the seriousness of health itself.

And Joy believes design will be central to getting there.

“We are still building, learning and listening,” she said. “Somalens launched in December 2025, so this is really just the beginning for us. But the vision is clear: we want to contribute to a future where technology makes engaging with your health easier, more inclusive and more rewarding.”

From its initial launch to its latest gamification features, Somalens' first months have been about experimentation and iteration.

For the woman helping shape the experience, however, the question driving the work remains surprisingly simple:

What if healthcare technology was designed for more people — and felt like something they actually wanted to use?

For Joy Bachashe Samuel and Somalens, answering that question may define what comes next.