Real-time monitoring care application for nurses

About the project

Our client is a Norwegian preventive healthcare company committed to creating products that improve the quality of life of patients and healthcare specialists.

They created a noninvasive patient monitoring system that enables nurses to assess a patient's condition effectively by continuously tracking vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, and respiration rate, as well as oximetry.

During the final stage of the hardware development, our client needed software to acquire, analyse, and visualise data from the device. It would then notify the nurses if the patient’s health deteriorated and alert them so they could respond rapidly to urgent healthcare needs.

The application is being developed in compliance with the legal acts including Medical Device Regulation (2017/745) and standards ISO 13485, IEC 62304, and IEC 62366 to make it dependable and trustworthy when used by nurses to provide patients with top-quality care.

What did our client need?

Our goal was to develop a mobile app integrated with the hardware and a hub responsible for gathering the patient’s data.

The system collects the data and, based on them and the other patient’s details stored in the database, performs the condition severity estimation based on The National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) scoring system and sends the appropriate push notifications to the smartphones of nurses assigned to the specific patients.

If the assigned nurse cannot respond to the alert, it is forwarded to another medical staff member to ensure the patient receives prompt assistance.

Additionally, the app required customisable formulas that trigger push notifications for each patient. This feature ensures that nurses do not receive an excessive number of notifications for minor changes in vital signs, allowing them to adjust personalised alerts based on each patient's health status.

How did we approach it?

Our cooperation started with the Product Design phase when we gathered basic system requirements and provided initial project documentation. After four months of development, the first test release for the client with basic features was ready. During the following months, we gradually improved the application by adding new features while ensuring it was correctly maintained through testing by our QA Specialist.

One of the things we have been working on is our client’s idea of reducing the number of push notifications by using custom thresholds to personalise alerts for each patient. Thanks to this, nurses wouldn’t be swamped with notifications. In the meantime, during the software development process, we held regulatory consultations to prepare the medical device for the conformity assessment.

While working on the application, we didn’t have physical access to the hardware (as the work was going on parallel to ours), so we created an in-house signal simulator for testing purposes. The simulator imitates the signals the device sends, making our QA's job possible.

At the project's peak, a team of eight people, including the Project Leader, QA Specialist, Regulatory Specialist, Technical Expert, and Developers, was actively involved. We maintained a high level of collaboration with the client, using platforms like MS Teams and Google Meets for weekly meetings. These meetings provided a platform to present the application’s implemented features and discuss further development, ensuring the client's active involvement in the project.

What did we deliver?

• A mobile app integrated with a patient monitoring system that provides the nurses with real-time data and notifications about the patients.

• A list of patients assigned to specific nurses with information showing their vitals and icons indicating patients' condition interpreted through the NEWS2 scoring system.

• Custom thresholds which allow nurses to personalise push notifications and alerts for a particular patient and charts that show the historical patient's vitals constantly refreshed in real-time.

The system's primary goal is to enhance patient care and operational efficiency. It achieves this by automating routine tasks, alleviating the workload of healthcare staff, and significantly improving patient well-being and hospital management.

The nurse doesn’t have to physically monitor the patient's condition but gains remote access to their medical data in real-time. The application replaces the paper chart and allows the patient's data to be analysed and interpreted according to real data obtained from 24/7 monitoring, which can facilitate medical decision-making.