Fitness Tracking App

Our client asked us to develop a fitness tracker that would provide a gamified incentive for people to live healthier lives. We’ve created a multi-user application for 14 different health wearables.

.NET, fullstack

5 months

Challenge

Our client wanted us to develop a new IT tool for their portfolio. The idea was to quantify and collect user information to be categorized for the gamified internal system with the goal of increasing patient engagement. The app tracked steps, sleep, exercise, etc.

The app offered two types of challenges: group and individual, to increase the users’ physical activity. The challenges in our fitness tracking app sought to reward positive physical activities as if in a video game. The goal was to lead the users towards a healthier lifestyle.

The client based their business model on engaging companies that would enroll their employees in the challenges, with the option for each company to have a customized user experience. The client’s particular requirement was to make sure that the app was compatible with the 14 most popular fitness wearables available on the market at the time.

Solution

With the request to gather data from multiple wellness devices into a single app, we faced the choice between:

a) building a custom connector for each device’s API, and

b) using a service that collects data in one place.

After careful consideration of both options and the cost of the second one, our client opted to go with the first suggestion.

We could have developed our fitness tracker with 14 tracking API integrations and a customized look and feel for each user. With an individual integration point per API, ten companies would, for example, end up with 140 endpoints to track and maintain data and activities in real-time.

A more straightforward option that we went along with was creating a single point of integration for all users and APIs. The result was a fitness tracking app with 14 tracking API integrations, complete with the following key features:

• The app processes all activities in real-time, and results are immediately available to users.

• Every user has a customizable experience.

• A queue-supported platform created for real-time processing of activity data to minimize potential race conditions issues.

• Scalable, dedicated processing of activities to prevent any potential performance issues and manage periodic increases in traffic.

• A unified approach to emulate automatic synchronization (pub/sub).

Benefits

Aside from the benefits above, our fitness tracker increased the client’s portfolio with the noble purpose of making people healthier. The app itself was easy to use, offered instantly visible results, and provided users with a fun, game-like activity.

Additionally, by creating a single integration point for all users, we have:

• Enabled the client to easily add new users, assigning them custom/branded UI and functionalities.

• Enabled the client to easily add even more health devices as they are introduced to the market.

• Drastically reduced the IT maintenance effort for the fitness software.