Ihua 🌸 — Building an AI Women's Health Agent for the African Woman with Hermes Agent

This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge

What I Built

Ihua 🌸 — from the Kikuyu word for flower — is a women's health agent built specifically for the African woman. No app to download, no advice that assumes you shop at Whole Foods. Just a warm, knowledgeable companion on Telegram that helps you understand your own body using your own data, your own budget, and foods that actually exist in your market.

I built Ihua because I kept getting health advice that didn't fit my life. Apps telling me to eat salmon and feta cheese. Cycle trackers assuming a 28-day cycle is universal. Health content written for someone else entirely. Every woman deserves to understand her own body — in her own context, with her own food, on her own budget. That's Ihua.

What Ihua does:

• 🌸 Learns YOUR body — your cycle, patterns, symptoms, not a generalized western template
• 📅 Tracks and predicts your period based on your own history
• 💰 Helps you save daily in KES so your kit is ready when your period arrives
• 🥬 Recommends real foods — sukuma wiki, omena, groundnuts — not feta cheese
• ⚠️ Notices patterns early and raises the alarm before you do
• 💙 Works around your preferences — no medication? Ihua prepares your body naturally

Demo

Code

NjeriCodeCraft / ihuatrial

Ihua 🌸 — An AI Women's Health Agent for the African Woman, Built with Hermes Agent

View on GitHub

My Tech Stack

• Frontend: React + Vite
• Agent: Hermes Agent by Nous Research — local, open source, self-hosted
• Messaging: Telegram Bot API via Hermes Gateway (@IhuaHealth_bot)
• Scheduling: Hermes built-in cron scheduler for period reminders
• Memory: Hermes persistent memory + localStorage
• Styling: CSS custom properties — terracotta, forest green, cream
• Fonts: Cormorant Garamond + DM Sans + Dancing Script

How I Used Hermes Agent

1. Telegram Gateway — meeting her where she is

Using hermes gateway run I connected @IhuaHealth_bot directly to Hermes Agent. African women are already on Telegram — no new app needed. One token from BotFather and Ihua was live.

2. Persistent Memory — Ihua remembers you

When a user completes onboarding, her cycle data, health conditions, budget and preferences are stored in Hermes' memory. Every conversation picks up exactly where it left off. No repeating yourself.

3. Cron Scheduling — reminders that actually help

Hermes' built-in cron scheduler sends period reminders 3 days before the predicted next period. Many women are caught off guard by their bodies. Three days of warning changes that.

4. Skill System — Ihua's personality

I created a custom skill file (~/.hermes/skills/ihua.md) defining Ihua's voice: warm like a trusted older sister, recommends African foods by name, prices in KES, never diagnoses, always points to a doctor when something sounds serious.

5. Multi-step Reasoning — noticing what you miss

When users log symptoms over time, Hermes reasons across that data and surfaces patterns the user hasn't noticed herself — connecting cycle changes to food, mood, and health conditions like PCOS.

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Hermes Agent is the entire brain of Ihua. The React dashboard is the window into what she knows. The Telegram bot is where she lives. 🌸