The Nixon-Hayles Award and the Hidden Work of Food Allergy Families
This is an impact story in Raffy's Village: a series exploring the lived reality of food allergies from every perspective, not just the clinical diagnosis, but the daily work that happens in real homes. Here, founder Helena Ngo reflects on Raffy Allergy winning the inaugural Nixon-Hayles Award for Innovation, and why formal recognition matters far beyond industry circles for the families holding a measuring spoon over a child's breakfast every morning.
Long before I stood on a stage to accept a national innovation award, I stood at my kitchen counter, staring at half a teaspoon of crushed cashew and trying to decide if my son was coming down with a cold.
The context
I’ve spent nearly two decades working across the pharmaceutical, consumer healthcare, and food industries with global organizations like GlaxoSmithKline and Sigma Company. Later, I worked almost 2 years building a digital health startup focused on chronic pain management. So I understand medical protocols, clinical evidence, and regulatory frameworks.
But when my son was diagnosed with severe allergies and prescribed adrenaline auto-injectors at age five, my professional fluency met an entirely different reality: the daily, high-stakes isolation of managing a potentially life-threatening, chronic condition at home.
Over a decade, my partner and I navigated both traditional avoidance pathways and complex exposure protocols for our son. Through that journey, I identified a recurring gap that no clinical trial or hospital consultation seemed structured to fill; the massive, unguided space between appointments.
That experience led to the creation of Raffy Allergy, a digital health platform designed to serve as the missing daily support layer between an allergist’s high-level oversight and a family’s home-based execution.
In September, at the Medtech Actuator Demo Day, Raffy Allergy was named the inaugural winner of the Nixon-Hayles Award for Innovation.
The invisible gap
When a family embarks on an allergy exposure pathway; such as Oral Immunotherapy (OIT) or landmark national clinical models like the ADAPT Program hosted by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI), they leave the hospital with a clear medical protocol.
What they don't leave with is someone beside them in the kitchen.
In clinical trials, every dose is measured, monitored, and recorded under strict supervision. In daily life, that same 730-day protocol is handed over to parents, grandparents, and nannies.
It requires daily decisions about cofactors that medical guidelines mention, but that real life may complicate: a slight temperature, an intense physical education class, a hot shower, or an anxious hesitation before school.
When families return for a monthly specialist review, the allergist asks how dosing went. What exists to answer that question is rarely clean data. Instead, it’s what I call "fragments", scraps of paper, fragmented smartphone notes, unreliable memory, or stressful mental tallies.
Clinicians are then expected to make critical protocol adjustments based on incomplete memories.
What changed
The landscape of food allergy care is undergoing a historical shift. For decades, management meant strict, permanent avoidance. Today, groundbreaking advances in Oral Immunotherapy are moving allergy treatment from strict avoidance toward active desensitization and early pediatric tolerance.
Programs like ADAPT are shifting peanut OIT out of specialized trial labs into standard pediatric hospital care across Australia, targeting remission rates of 70 to 80 percent in infants.
Yet, medical evolution creates new operational tension. Moving from a simple rule ("never touch peanut") to a dynamic protocol ("ingest 650mg of peanut protein daily, unless there is a fever or exercise within two hours") introduces continuous cognitive load for caregivers.
Raffy was built to hold that weight.
After engaging with over 100 food allergy families and consulting leading advocacy bodies like Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy (ASCIA) and Allergy & Anaphylaxis Australia, I designed a digital application that structures clinical protocols into clear daily tracks.
Parents log cofactors, doses, reactions, and compiles structured real-world data directly for clinician portals.
What validation actually looks like
Winning the Nixon-Hayles Award for Innovation is significant within the startup ecosystem. But for food allergy families, the award carries a deeper meaning.
Historically, software built for parents has been categorized as "lifestyle apps" or basic habit trackers. The inaugural Nixon-Hayles Award explicitly recognizes that home-based protocol execution is serious clinical work.
By honoring a tool designed to support home dosing safety, the medical community is formally acknowledging a truth allergy parents have long known: the success of modern allergy treatment doesn't just depend on biological mechanisms; it depends on whether a parent can execute a protocol safely at home for two years straight.
It validates that a mother double-checking a dose count or worrying over a cofactor isn't being overly cautious, she is carrying out a complex medical procedure without a clinical team present.
Who it serves
If you ask me what drives the platform, I defer to the human ecosystem surrounding each child.
It serves the mother who feels her pulse quicken every time she opens a pouch of allergen powder. It serves the nanny who needs absolute clarity on whether a cooked dish is safe under a new protocol. It serves the allergist who wants structured, reliable data during a consultation rather than vague summaries or worse of all, no notes.
But most of all, it serves the child. When daily dosing becomes structured, predictable, and calm, the emotional friction surrounding food allergies may begin to recede. Meals may stop feeling like medical tests and start feeling like dinner again.
Why it matters
What comes through in Raffy’s milestone win is that digital health innovation isn't just about algorithms or hardware, it is about human translation.
It is about bridging the gap between a world-leading hospital research institute and someone’s kitchen table on a Tuesday morning. It is about ensuring that as medical science expands what is possible for food allergy families, technology is there to make sure no one has to figure out the daily execution alone.
Winning an innovation award doesn't change the daily reality of measuring a dose tomorrow morning. But it proves that the invisible, relentless effort taking place in thousands of homes is finally being seen, valued, and supported by the highest levels of healthcare innovation.