Obesity research app for Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH)

Real World Data

Healthcare Application Development

Population Health Research

About

Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) is a ~395-bed facility and is ranked the #1 comprehensive pediatric hospital. BCH research teams are involved in many novel and ground-breaking research initiatives that aim to advance pediatric patients' care possibilities.

The Challenge

Build an engaging and technically robust mobile application for use in research of teen obesity. The solution should enable the research participants to answer several questions on food/lifestyle choices, add a description of food items being consumed with images, text, and videos and record an audio diary – all in an interactive fun way.

The Solution

BTC built an interactive iPhone app to capture data from participants in multiple formats.

We built a survey in the app to capture food and lifestyle data through scheduled questionnaires.

The app’s interface allowed participants to capture audio, video, and pictures using the phone’s camera and voice recorder to record their environment and activity information.

The app was integrated with a utility to voice text conversion and capture geolocation and time stamp.

The app personalized the participants’ experiences by integrating the device’s calendar to trigger the surveys at specified times.

The application offered a frictionless experience despite handling heavy image and media files and seamlessly and instantly transferred user inputs to a secure cloud.

Devices: Android & iOS

Technology:

  • Mobile: Android & iOS
  • Back end: Java
  • DB: MySQL
  • Application Server: Tomcat

The Outcome

The participants received the app well, a no small feat given that the age group was primarily between 15 to 18-year-olds.

The researchers could attain a high percentage of survey participation and completion rates from the 150 study participants.

Clinicians and researchers used the novel data gathered by the app to think of fresh approaches to treat and prevent obesity.

[image credit: People photo created by pressfoto – www.freepik.com]

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