Enabling robust health data collection from Withings devices

The Challenge

The client conducts clinical trials to measure the efficacy of their investigational drugs for various diseases. These trials required monitoring patients daily and collecting some of the measures of their health status from the Withings devices that patients used. There were two studies to be launched, one for the US and the other for Europe, involving eight different countries.

The challenges involved were:

• Integrate the Withings SDK to capture health data directly from the Withings devices. 
• Manage the registration of patients with the app and Withings and maintain the security infrastructure for secure data read and write.
• Support eight different languages.
• Handle callbacks from Withings cloud to read the data to be displayed on patients’ dashboard.
• Build a cloud solution that adheres to healthcare industry regulations such as HIPAA to safeguard study participants’ sensitive health information.

The Solution

• BTC developed Android and iOS mobile applications to handle the app registration and registration of the Withings devices via the Withings SDK.
• The solution linked the mobile apps to the Withings Body+ (a WiFi weighing scale ) and Withings Move (an activity tracker wristwatch).
• Enable the data sync between the Withings devices and the Withings cloud via Bluetooth.
• Read back data from Withings cloud for display to the patients via app dashboards.
• The mobile apps tracked fifteen health parameters, including body weight, BMI, sleep cycle, and calories burned.
• App users were identified via a unique identifier linked to the corporate account. Users could securely log in to the app, safeguarding sensitive patient health data.
• BTC also built an API application as a conduit to transfer data from Withings devices to the Withings cloud. The API application supported the API requirements of Withings native SDK.
• Since the Withings cloud is HIPAA compliant, there are specific ways to read the collected data. BTC built a secure and HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure to read the collected data and transfer it securely to the client’s data center. 

Devices:

Android  & iOS

Technology

• Mobile apps using Native: iOS, Android.
• Microservice based API architecture to support data transfer.
• Integration with Withings Native SDK.
• AWS Cloud for data store.

The Outcome

BTC‘s mobile applications helped the client launch 2 different studies (one for the US and the other across 7 countries in Europe) with a single set of applications. This enabled the collection of patient-generated health data from Withings devices without patients’ inputs. The use of secure digital technologies protected the data in rest and transit. Mobile applications were built using the latest user experience standards and adhered to relevant industry regulations. The client captured meaningful, reliable measures of participants’ health status and utilized that as a novel endpoint.