Fitness Bracelet App
The customer is an IT company providing software solutions for the healthcare sector in the UK and abroad. Their clients are different divisions of NHS as well as private healthcare institutions.
Surgical operations are stressful for a patient's body and can have various complications. The general physical condition of the patient before the operation greatly influences the operation outcome, especially for senior patients. Such patients are often recommended to perform some kind of physical activity, e.g. walking, for some time before the operation to mitigate possible negative outcomes. However, a considerable part of patients does not follow the recommendations close enough and are in risk group because of that. The risk could be lowered if healthcare professionals would be able to track the physical activities of the patients and intervene if the level of activity is not sufficient.
Specialised medical-grade activity tracking bracelets are used to gather information about the patient’s activity before the operation. The data is gathered by the patient's mobile device and sent to the back end for processing and reviewing by clinicians in a web-based UI. Software Country developed and implemented Android and iOS mobile applications, as well as the web-based UI for clinicians.
The mobile application provides connectivity with the bracelet, data syncing in the background, and sending the data to the back end. After getting the explicit patient’s consent to send physical activity data to his or her clinician, the application gathers data in background mode with minimal user interaction, which enables healthcare professionals to guide the patient toward surgical operation. The mobile application provides feedback to the user and displays the progress to the daily goal which is set by the clinician, e.g. 1000 steps a day.
The mobile application is a hybrid JavaScript application developed using Ionic Framework (AngularJS) and PhoneGap/Cordova. Most of the codebase is shared between Android and iOS. However, the application part which interfaces with the bracelet over Bluetooth and performs data sync in the background is implemented on the native level using Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS.
Physical activity of the patients is presented to clinicians using rich UI which helps to measure the physical activity level and determine if the patient is getting ready for the operation or might need some assistance.
The front-end app for clinicians is a single page application implemented using React framework.
Security and data privacy were the main focus during development because the application is handling sensitive data related to the patients and their health. The local storage on the mobile device is encrypted as well as data exchange channel with the back end. The app requires explicit user consent to start uploading bracelet data to the back end and share it with the clinicians.
The system was successfully demoed at the hospital where it will be deployed. The patients will start receiving the bracelets along with the mobile app this year.
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