Mobile health has reached a new high in recent years and continues to grow steadily. During the 2014-2015 academic year, healthcare applications accounted for 6.4% of the total of 40,402 applications in all existing industries, leaving ground only for news and business applications.
Current mobile health is able to transform any Android / iOS device into a cardiologist, nutritionist, fitness trainer or any other medical consultant. Surely users are happy to avoid visiting hospital offices for a regular medical exam or paying for the services of a personal instructor at the gym and simply downloading an app to their smartphone or tablet.
To make an app more accessible, it is reasonable to go for it multiplatform – for all iOS and Android users to savor your idea and implementation. But it should be decided from the beginning of the development project which of the cross-platform frameworks suits you best. And to do that, you should carefully evaluate the concept of your application.
On the track
The simplest health-oriented app you can create is one information resource, such as a collection of healthy recipes, a symptom database, or an exercise manual. This type of application is technically easy to create in any cross-platform tool, as it only constitutes a simple textual and graphical information structure and does not require complexity in development. And as shown in Application of nutritional data which provides information on the compatibility of foods with a certain blood type, even a simple application can be really captivating and useful.
There is also demand from users of various types of crawlers. Calorie counters, fitness calculators, and health managers who keep records of medical condition: The main idea of all these applications is to allow the entry of information and generate detailed statistics afterwards. Trackers may or may not be supplemented with reminders, which send notifications for a user to perform a specific action (e.g., taking medication / drinking water / walking).
Unless you’re worried that the design isn’t native, you can use Cordova and develop any of the types of applications mentioned in an easy, cost-effective, and fast way, in a matter of 1-3 months. Otherwise, you can take advantage of Xamarin. With Xamarin.Forms you can adapt the interface to the unique look of the platform and, if necessary, improve it in Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android. By developing native design separately, you’re sure to lengthen your development process, but in return, you’ll gain users ’admiration for offering them a genuinely native experience.
Making sense
The ultimate appeal of mobile health applications lies in the intelligence they can have. Because it is well-versed in the healthcare software industry in general, ScienceSoft can claim that sensor technology is a real step towards mobile health. As sensors are becoming smaller, cheaper, and much easier to embed in a smartphone or tablet, they provide developers with a whole new level of capabilities.
Thanks to integrated sensors such as the gyroscope, accelerometer and simple cameras, each and every modern mobile device can run on its own an application for heart rate detection, blood pressure scanning, step counting or an application for vision test. But with the help of various medical accessories, included wrist watches, necklaces, tiaras and chest straps with sensors or even portable ultrasound devices, your smartphone or tablet can become a professional portable medical equipment. However, there is some controversy in developing a cross-platform application that supports these complex features.
A smart choice for this app is Xamarin. Although the development process has been expanded due to complex and multilevel testing, this cross-platform tool delivers efficient results. Xamarin compiles its code in native and thus allows an application to perfectly access all the hardware of the device. Looking back at a similar ScienceSoft development project from a heart rate indicator, which involved the use of a chest strap with pluggable sensor, it is clear that Xamarin would have been a perfect fit to make this cross-platform application.
Unfortunately, Córdoba does not support by default the creation of a cross-platform application that freely accesses specific installations. The advantage is that this initial limitation can be solved. If Cordova’s HTML, CSS, or Java is enhanced with additional C ++ encoding, the application will be able to connect to the platform’s hardware, as well as a Xamarin application. Needless to say, the process will require time and budget, but this is a justifiable sacrifice for the implementation of your original idea.
It is difficult to determine, in theory, whether the amount of time spent improving Córdoba would be equivalent to the time of the Xamarin complex tests and whether the budget for additional C ++ coding in Córdoba would cover the costs of developing Xamarin C #. To be sure, it is always best to look professional mobile consulting and discuss all merits with those who have experience in all sorts of projects.
Summary
Creating a mobile health application it is always a double victory. First of all, thanks to a healthy lifestyle that is achieved, you will attract many users. Second, a launch of a useful health app proves you yourself worry about your users. So, in fact, you not only get the attention of the users, but also their subconscious sympathy.
You will certainly multiply your success and strengthen the trust of your users with a great performance of the application by making the right choice between Xamarin and Cordova and, as a result, presenting a powerful and easy to use health application.
