NotYet: Health Monitoring App Development

Сlient

NotYet is a medical startup based in the USA. The company’s innovative business idea revolves around comprehensive remote health monitoring for elderly patients. Special wristbands should track essential health indicators, ranging from body temperature to ECG and blood pressure. NotYet’s aim was to create a custom healthcare software solution that makes it possible and brings together medical specialists and elder patients.

In the US, heart disease is considered to be the leading cause of death among people over 60 years old. So far, there was no working solution that would allow monitoring blood pressure and other vital health signs with a wearable device users could carry anywhere. Such a healthcare software solution should include:

• A wristband that constantly monitors blood pressure and a wide range of other vitals.
• A mobile app synchronized with the wearable that enables relatives and doctors of elderly users to monitor their health remotely and sends notifications if the person feels unwell.

Project idea: Develop an MVP to promote the product

The company needed to secure further investments and start promoting the wristbands. Therefore, NotYet wanted to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) of the app to launch it quickly. While our team was working on it, the company improved several prototypes of the wristband and sent it to our team to transmit data to the future app.

Challenges

The most pressing factor was a tight time frame for the project: we had to create a high-quality MVP in less than 5 months. Along with that, we faced data transmission and UI challenges. Therefore, we had to fulfill the following goals:

• It was important for NotYet to stay within budget.
• We had to meet the tight deadline of 5 months with the MVP.
• The app’s accuracy and stability were crucial — as they always are for healthcare apps.
• The wristbands use Bluetooth to transmit health data. The initial solution showed unsatisfactory stability for some types of files and required reworking.
• The graph libraries suitable for healthcare apps didn’t have the built-in ability to scroll the graph, which impeded user experience.

Solutions

Our team figured out a complicated tech specification, backend and frontend challenges, and provided a working MVP of the software solution for healthcare.

Firebase Firestore as a backend

The client asked us to develop the MVP without a backend in its traditional sense. Instead, we used Firebase Firestore solutions for authorization, sending, and receiving data.

Using Firestore as a backend for mobile apps is a common solution. However, it might quickly become costly when processing a large amount of requests. We were able to optimize data requests to the backend to stay within the Firestore’s free quota — and therefore not exceed the client’s budget.

Bluetooth for data transfer

One of the key features of the NotYet app is the ability to transmit ECG data from a wearable device to a smartphone. Since the app’s already in use, data transmission solutions were not suitable for ECG. So, we’ve developed our own method that allowed us to achieve a reliable and consistent Bluetooth connection for transmitting health data.

Data visualization

Our developers programmed the custom healthcare software solution that groups the data for graphs in intervals, determining what values represent a health risk. However, the most complicated part was to figure out the way to determine the ECG rhythm type from the wristband data, which we’ve also successfully done.

Scrollable graphs

Our engineers had extensive experience in developing graphs for mobile apps. But the NotYet app required the ability to scroll through graphs horizontally — a feature not readily available in the libraries for healthcare software solutions.

To solve this issue, we divided the screen into dynamic and static parts. Then we created a graph that exceeds the screen width, but users can scroll through it. Making part of the screen dynamic provided a user-friendly way to view and interact with detailed health data.

Results

We met tight deadlines and built a stable and feature-rich MVP for health monitoring:

• Saved time and budget on development. NotYet app’s MVP was released in app stores for Android and iOS devices. We developed it with Flutter — a cross-platform framework that allows creating performant and native-looking apps for mobile and desktop devices from a single code base, which saves time and money. Currently, we provide full-cycle Flutter development services to clients all over the world.
• Refined and optimized the existing UX/UI of the app. During the development, we improved the app interface thanks to the insights from our analysts. The app offers essential health monitoring functions: users can track body temperature, ECG, and blood pressure through special wearable wristbands.
• Provided detailed technical specifications. Thanks to our systemic approach to testing and documentation, we prepared extensive tech specs and use case scenarios. Such comprehensive data will be helpful for the future app improvements, especially its pairing with the wristband.

NotYet warmly received the app’s MVP and shortly after trusted us with further works on the project’s backlog. Since our team has extensive experience in healthcare software development solutions, we are excited to work on a project that makes it easier for people to understand and monitor the health of their loved ones from anywhere.