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Digital Health
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Mobile App
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The Inspirers mobile app helps patients with hypertension to keep track of their blood pressure and adhere to medication and therapeutic plans. It focuses on senior people with hypertension.
The project is a collaboration between the Portuguese healthcare company, MEDIDA, which specializes in research and development services that treat and address allergic and respiratory diseases, and, simultaneously, our client, and the CINTESIS research center, an R&D department of the University of Porto.
A client came to us to help build an app that’ll be a reflection of the project on adherence studies for people with hypertension. They’ve already been working on functionality that would count pills in a blister and capture blood pressure values on the measurement device via photo.
At Diversido, we needed to create a beta version of the app that would embody this and other functionality. With Inspirers, collaborators planned to apply for a new grant that would allow them to develop the solution further.
While working on the Inspirers project, we:
Of course, development didn’t go without challenges. Let’s talk about what they were and how we’ve solved them.
The target audience of Inspirers is people with hypertension, a lot of whom are the elderly without access to the Internet. At the same time, mHealth solutions must be built on the principles of accessibility. Thus, our app had to work reliably without an Internet connection.
All the patient data is stored directly on the user’s device. Synchronization with the server occurs whenever the internet connection is restored. The synchronization flow we’ve developed allows users to access their data offline from different devices. When the devices go online, the information from them is updated and merged, minimizing the possibility of data loss.
The current version of the app is bilingual — Inspirers is available in Portuguese and English. The length of titles in the two languages often differs. Hence, the app design had to be simple and robust, with easy-to-read text (and UI, adaptable for various language configurations). The client also wanted to be able to add new localization languages fast.
To ensure design success, we tested UI extensively across both versions of localization, including the date/time format that differed for Portugal and the United Kingdom.
Knowing that the client planned to scale the app to be localized in Spain – and needed it to allow quick addition of new languages – we didn’t hardcode the app texts, instead containing them in XML documents. Right now, to add new languages, the client simply needs to add a new section of translations to the XML and ship it to the app, – as opposed to creating new UI screens for localized versions of the texts.
The client wanted Inspirers to have an extensive, well-performing system for push notifications for both iOS and Android. We couldn't find a cross-platform solution for local (push) notifications that would satisfy all our requirements, and Android versions were not stable.
We used two separate open-source solutions for iOS (Shiny.Notifications) and Android (localnotificationsplugin). For Android, we went through several iterations and tried several other solutions, before we could find a stable-working one.
During the development process and after the test release and after gathering feedback from the first users, we realized we can improve the app’s UX even further, although this improvement had not been requested by the client. For instance, for the app to have more value, it had to be able to parse, process, and search across the drug list. There also have been edge use cases for the medication intake scheduler to be considered — e.g., when users administer the pill out of schedule, which is often the case with the painkillers in patients with chronic pain. Apart from that, users of the beta version gave their feedback on functionality: they need more flexible options in dozing reports, in case they’ve taken ½ of the pill instead of the whole.
Our team has worked diligently on incorporating user feedback and UX additions that occurred to be vital during development to perfect the app.
Currently, Inspirers is in its beta version. The app facilitates control over hypertension measurements and medicine intake, with two corresponding modules and an additional module that generates reports on the user's progress.
Within features of the medication module, users add drug lists from prescriptions, including required dosages and intake schedules. They receive notifications when it’s time to take their pill and are prompted to take photographs of the blister pack. That promotes accountability & makes adherence easy: patients don’t skip pills and don’t take the same pills twice if they forgot if they’ve already taken one. As a result, Inspirers increases treatment efficiency and helps doctors save lives.
In the blood pressure measurement module, patients first create a plan and indicate how often and when they would like to measure their blood pressure (or they can choose a standard, 7-day measuring plan.) To record the data, a user takes a picture of the display of their measuring device.
Within Inspirers, we’ve built the following features:
At the moment, the main stage of the project is completed, but we’re keeping in touch with the client to help with further advancement if needed.
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Out technical, design, sales & marketing teams will gladly share their expertise and help bringing your idea to life!
Book A Meeting
Out technical, design, sales & marketing teams will gladly share their expertise and help bringing your idea to life!
Book A Meeting
