Helping People Manage Their Diabetes And Improving Quality Of Life
Several of our team members got their start in mobile app development back in 2008 when the first iPhone was released. Our team of engineers and designers started with developed a prototype to using XCode and Objective C to allow people with diabetes to track their glucose values throughout the day and graph them to see trends. After demonstrating the prototype to our customer, it turned into over a decade of development and lead to several positive patient outcomes; including saving saving a young child with diabetes life.
We have done everything from native and also cross platform. When developing on native platforms, we have used everything from Objective C, Swift, Android and Kotlin. Our team has extensive experience with C#.NET and the Xamarin platform my Microsoft. By leveraging this technology, we were able to make 90% of the code reusable between iOS and Android. While not perfect, the Xamarin Forms technology allowed code to be reused even at the UI layer.
One of the biggest diabetes companies in the world engaged our team to help them with the software development, design and product management of their new mobile app. It was a Class II Medical Device regulated by the FDA therefore a strict quality system to ensure patient safety was required. Given some of our team members at LFT Software have over 15 years of developing regulated medical device software, we were up for the task.
We were able to leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to connect and transfer data from several different BG meters. If you are unfamiliar with BLE, be sure to checkout one of the industry experts (and former colleague) Mohammad Afaneh’s tutorial. Mohammad has worked on some of the most complex embedded engineering and bluetooth problems in the world! BLE can be very challenging from an engineering perspective to work with on iOS and Android. Standards have been helping to overcome this problem.
A critical feature we worked on was called Bolus Advice. When a user entered the amount of carbohydrates that they ate into the app, a complex algorithm was developed to tell the diabetic how much insulin they needed to inject. This was very novel for the industry back in 2012. By using data analytics in the application, we could tell that we were giving patients over 12,000 recommendations every day! That felt really good that we were able to help our client realize their vision and remove the guess work of how much insulin needed to be injected.
One of our favorite stories of the mobile app we helped develop came directly from the call center. A mother called and said that the texting feature we developed helped save her son’s life. During a brainstorming session with our client, we came up with an idea to send a “text” to a caregiver when their child’s sugar level (BG) either went too high or too low. We knew we did something right when we heard this mother’s story of getting a text when her son started to go low (hypoglycemia). Hearing stories like this makes all of the coding, testing and rigor worth it!
We also played a large role in getting the mobile app localized into 25+ languages and launched in over 100 countries all over the world.
Technologies used: Swift, Java, Xamarin, C#, BLE, Azure DevOps, GitHub, Xamarin Forms, Xamarin Test Cloud, Google Analytics, NUnit, Azure DevOps Pipelines.
To learn more about diabetes, be sure to check out these great resources:
