Connected health mobile app solution for users to manage their heart health

Client Background

Client is a global leader in the field of clinically proven, innovative medical equipment for health monitoring and therapy. It has a Global No.1 brand in digital blood pressure monitors.
The company also provides healthcare solutions which includes mobile apps, remote patient monitoring solutions and connected ecosystems to enable healthcare infrastructure consisting of doctors, hospitals, patients, and healthcare support staff.

Project Overview

Client wanted to develop a connected health mobile app solution with their “Going for Zero” mission to eliminate heart attack and stroke.

Business Requirements

As a leading manufacturer of healthcare devices, the client wanted to build a mobile app for users to manage their heart health from anywhere using their smart mobile phones. The solution would connect with multiple home monitoring medical devices to deliver patterns and health indicators plotted against graphs and charts.

Key features:

01. Connect to devices

Block Pressure
EKG – Alivecor
Scales
Thermometer
SPO2

02. Add notes to track
03. View data/trends for all the years
04. Share data with physician, Apple health, Google fit, Samsung health
05. Generate reports to see monthly analysis and trends
06. Track medications
07. Implement smart insights to motivate users
08. Cash back point based reward system

Challenges

  1. Setup Agile teams for MVP and continuous improvements and releases.
  2. Connect multiple medical devices using BLE, Audio.
  3. Data security and be HIPAA compliant.
  4. Build an extensible and scalable architecture to support multiple countries and languages.
  5. Build at speed and ensure high quality to meet client’s standards.

Solution

To solve the problem, we developed a mobile app which helps users to manage their chronic condition. App will sync vital data from medical devices like Blood Pressure Monitors, Thermometers and Weigh Scale Machines, EKG, etc. This helps users to track their vital health stats anytime, anywhere on their smartphones or tablet in a secure cloud infrastructure.

The mobile app that we developed has some powerful features that make it useful for patients to monitor their health stats on the go.

Here is a detailed description of the mobile app:

A Connected Health Mobile App with Powerful Features to Track Vital Health Stats

01. Dashboard
This area of the app is where the users can see a snapshot of their health stats and other diagnostics all in one go and navigate to the other sections of the app.

02. History
Using this feature, users can see their entire historical health stats recorded over a period of time in list and graphical view. Users can also see their average and other useful stats over time.

03. Insights
Users can get a lot of important insights about their health from the health data logged in the app for each user.

04. Premium Subscription
The app also provides some premium features which users can get only after paying a subscription fee via in-app purchase. Some of the subscription based premium features are following:

Care team (Premium)
Users can add his own care team which could be a family member or doctor with their email to share his/her health data.

Rewards (Premium)
To motivate the users to regularly track his health and motivate to adopt a healthy lifestyle, cash back points-based reward system was implemented.

Premium Reports (Premium)
Users get a graphical representation of his/her health data as a pdf report.

Medication (Premium)
Users can add their medicines and track the status of each medication through the app and can set the reminders to take those medications.

Design Scalable Software Architecture
The connected ecosystem that we developed requires a complex architecture considering the ecosystem involves various moving parts. We decided to go ahead with the AWS cloud based serverless architecture which is designed to be scalable, secure, and limited maintenance with an ability to handle failure with an alert mechanism. Here are some details:

  • AWS API gateway, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3 and Lambda (using Nodejs) to create RESTful API for quick response time and scalability as per demands.
  • Backend interaction was implemented using Nodejs in AWS lambda and AWS API gateway.

Secure Cloud Based Infrastructure to Store Patient’s Data
We realize that patient data is extremely sensitive. Hence it needs to be secure. To enable maximum security, we used an AWS private cloud using AWS DynamoDB and AWS S3 for data storage and retrieval. Also, User Signup and Authentication was done using AWS Cognito services. We setup an NOC team to ensure that any incident is tracked and closed as per the defined SLA. We implemented multiple monitoring tools from AWS to track.

Results

By partnering with us for this project our client was able to get the following results

A Fully Integrated Patient Mobile App
The mobile app that we developed for our client was not just a one-off solution but what we built was a fully integrated solution that encompasses combining hardware, software, middleware, and cloud infrastructure to deliver a data driven high quality solution.

Analytics Driven Reports
The system that we built could deliver analytics based self-serviced reports that provides users with deep insights and stats about their data. This helps them to share this with their physician to see trends and take action for managing their health.

Significant Cost Savings on Server Cost
Using AWS cloud services we were able to deliver a scalable and secure environment that reduced the server costs considerably.

HIPAA Compliant Solution
The solution that we developed is 100% HIPAA compliant which means we followed the best compliance practices in storing patient’s health data.

Dedicated Team
We set-up a dedicated team that offered end to end services from Mobile App development, Back-end developers, AWS experts, NOC team and security experts.

Unmatched Value
One of the top apps in the Health and Fitness category with a rating of 4.6 out of 38.9K reviews. The solution we developed and the whole engagement model provided great value to the client with respect to cost-effectiveness, high quality and faster time to market.

Deepesh Goel

Seasoned Technology leader with 25 years of diverse experience in delivering software products and solutions across connected healthcare, retail, and finance verticals serving large enterprises as well as nimble startups globally.