Smart IoT Injectibles Companion
Novel IoT and mobile connected health app improves patient comfort and confidence by guiding and monitoring self-administered medication injections increasing the number of successful injections and improving medication adherence.
The Challenge
A leading multinational biopharmaceutical company needed a solution to track arthritis injections by patients remotely and refill the medication before they run out. The client wanted a front-end app developed using the Ionic app framework—an open source mobile UI toolkit for building web app experiences—but it did not support hardware level communication. Our task was to work closely with the hardware providers and develop a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows interworking with the smart injection solution.
The Approach
Due to the app framework limitation we would need to design a reusable library allowing two-way communication between the injector device and smartphone Ionic app. The library could be integrated with native or hybrid apps without concerns about low-level interaction with the Injector device. BLE-SDK, a multi-platform library (Android/iOS/hybrid) that enables easy access to data exported by a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device, would be employed. We would create an SDK containing code that could be included in apps. Once the app invoked the API, the rest of the work would be automated by the SDK for any connection (including scanning, LESEC pairing, and connection establishment over BLE) and data requests (including read/write and notifications).
The Results
NewPage, with our depth and breadth of knowledge in software development, met the client’s requirements by successfully producing a tracking solution that helps ensure arthritis patients never run out of injection medication, thus improving adherence. The injector is a BLE enabled IoT device that records injection details, which are fetched by the linked smart device (Android/IOS) for display within the app. Additional benefits: The reusable SDK is capable of handling multiple requests; the BLE-SDK is easy to use, secure, stable, lightweight and flexible; connection establishment and read/write with the BLE device is managed by the SDK, so apps don’t need to worry about it; apps can parse the translated JSON, so there is no the need to parse the ASCII value; and the APIs and naming conventions are intuitive, eliminating the need for developers to reference documentation.
