Background

Our client, a Canada-based healthcare technology company, provides pharmaceutical and other medical companies with an ePRO (electronic patient-reported outcome) platform. The platform allows organizations to conduct clinical trials among volunteers and patients testing drugs and diagnostic equipment.

The product consists of two main parts: 1) a web console used to assemble and customize tests that includes questionnaires, data from wearables, and other diagnostic devices, 2) iOS and Android mobile apps that are installed on user phones and operate these tests.

Maafor provided engineering services for both the web and mobile sides of the product.

Challenges

The engagement entailed building some modules from the ground up and refactoring the others:

• Build a research reporting tool
• Enable data export from mobile devices to an SAS environment
• Refactor iOS and Android application code
• Refactor the web console front-end code

Value Delivered

Convenient reporting tool for data analysis

The ePRO platform collects large amounts of data with many variables. To make the further research analysis accessible to scientists, Maafor engineers built a data reporting tool that supports data visualization and specific queries to retrieve needed research records. This greatly simplifies the readability and understanding of collected records.

Export of patient data for SAS using R language

As organizations partnering with our client use SAS Healthcare Analytics solutions, Maafor’s engineering team has developed an automatic data export instrument that made patient-reported data coming from smartphones available to SAS operation. The engineers used R language for the conversion script that exported data into the .xpt format. The converted datasets were further transmitted to client’s servers. Additionally, all collected data was structured according to CDISC standards (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium).

Comprehensive iOS/Android refactoring and optimization

The existing mobile applications were largely outdated and required elaborate code refactoring that would ensure code stability and speed. For instance, the iOS application combined both Objective-C and Swift code. The Maafor mobile team rebuilt all modules using Swift. Additionally, the Swift code itself needed partial refactoring to align it with modern Swift standards.

Web console refactoring and optimization

The existing front-end of the web console used an outdated jQuery library and an old version of Bootstrap. JavaScript engineers at Maafor fully rebuilt the web console using the Vue.js framework and updated Bootstrap. This ensured product optimization and further scalability.

Approach and technical info

The project was handled in a time-and-material engagement model. The team consisted of a software architect, a DevOps specialist, Java engineer, iOS engineer, two JavaScript engineers, a quality assurance specialist, and a project manager.

The technology stack included R language, Vue.js, Java, and Swift.

The duration of the project was 5 months with the total scope of work done in about two man-years.