Healthcare Wearable App Development: Features & Challenges

If you’re thinking about your own digital startup, healthcare wearable app development might well be the best bet. Everyone would agree that sometimes, success hinges on “the right place, right time”. Market trends all point toward a leap in wearable app development. It is now the perfect alignment of technology advancements, social trends, and funding opportunities. Still, healthcare app development is not without its challenges. Most of them revolve around data. How to store and transmit it securely and reliably? With all this regulatory compliance, how to keep the costs down yet still innovate and keep your app user-centric?

In this blogpost, we’ll briefly outline the data facts to back up the statement about the best time for a healthcare app development. Then, we’ll share key features of wearable app development and address its challenges. 

Why now is the best time to get your own healthcare wearable app?

Technological innovation

If you just examine the possibilities for wearable sensors, there are plenty of options which have already proven their effectiveness. For instance, heart rate monitors, ECG sensors, continuous glucose monitors can be a standalone device or a part of a smartphone or smart ring functionality. They also can go as sensors on clothes and different bands.

Moreover, there are a lot of material advancements that push the boundaries even further. Electronic tattoos or epidermal electronics are extra thin sensors. They can be used for electrolyte analysis, glucose, lactate, and so on. 

In numbers, in 2018, there were 172.2 million unit shipments of wearables. In 2021, this figure reached 533.6. It represents 210% growth percent over 4 years of hardware production! By 2028, this figure will reach 612.5 million wearable units.

Social trends

Accessibility of technology to track health enables people to push awareness about their health. Just look at the number of health influencers and doctors speaking up on social media. In addition, regular people post their experiments with their diet while watching their continuous glucose monitor. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Conversations emerge and evolve in many directions. 

To analyze it in numbers, let’s take a separate term like ‘gut health’. In 2018, it had 15% popularity on Google trends. In May 2024, this term reached 100% popularity. 

The same is true for Google trends for ‘continuous glucose monitor’. In 2018 had a rock bottom 3% popularity while reaching 93% popularity in November 2024. 

There are emerging topics like that all over the place. The graph below also shows trends for ‘smart rings’ and ‘smartglasses’ which are a part of healthcare wearable app development.

Funding in healthcare digital startups

Funding into digital health startups has been fluctuating drastically. Yet, the main trend towards greater funding availability remains.

According to Statista, in 2015, the digital healthcare industry received 6.1 billion US dollars in funding worldwide. In 2021, this number was $44.8 billion. This signifies quite a jump. Even with a drop to $23.3 billion, it is still well above 2015 levels. This means that interest is high and is likely to remain high. However, startups need to be cost-efficient in today’s healthcare wearable app development. This simply indicates a preference for lean MVP development. If you seek where to start with lean MVP development, consider our article “Lean Project Discovery Phase: Definition, Process, Benefits”.

Key Features in Healthcare Wearable App Development

Wearable app development begins by accessing the data from the hardware. For custom healthcare app development, there are Apple’s HealthKit and Google’s Fit API that access the data from iOS and Android device sensors. 

Many other devices also come with their APIs and SDKs. SDK stands for software development kit. When we talk about smartwatches, smart rings, glucose monitors, etc, manufacturers often provide ways to access data and transmit it over Bluetooth (BLE) or Wi-fi using interoperability standards like FHIR or Bluetooth Health Device Profile along with MCAP. FHIR stands for fast healthcare interoperability resources. MCAP stands for Multi-Channel Adaptation Protocol.

Once the app receives the data, we dive into the heart of wearable app development. It entails a variety of features to process and display the data for the user, provide personalized recommendations, and generate alerts and notifications.

User-centric design in Healthcare Wearable App Development

The app must consider the emotional, psychological and practical needs of the users. For instance, if it is a healthcare app development for tracking sleep patterns, users experience quite particular needs for the app’s design. It revolves around calm and non-intrusive designs that can foster user relaxation. It narrows the color palette to blues, greens, and muted colors. In addition, high-contrast elements are a no-go. 

However, if it is a fitness app or alert-oriented app, the approach is the opposite. Users will benefit from bright colors and high-contrast elements. 

In a fitness app that tracks steps, activity, calories and so on, gamification elements are a must.

Dashboards for wearable app development

The first and foremost consideration is user-centric design. In healthcare, there can be diverse user bases such as patients, caregivers, clinicians or others. 

• If the app is used for clinicians, the dashboard should look quite clean and informative akin to a report summary with the ability to view detailed data. 
• For caregivers, dashboards need to prioritize irregularities and inconsistencies with prescribed regimens such as meal times, hydration, exercise, or medicine intake.
• For patients, dashboard views must depend on their individual goals. 
• For other stakeholders in healthcare such as researchers or insurers, the dashboard view might feature aggregated data and risk factors.

Gradual onboarding, phased goal setting and progressive disclosure

Often, the initial motivation for getting a wearable app is to just start monitoring. Users cannot provide their goals right away. They start with passive monitoring. Therefore, users will get rather defensive if the app prompts them to set their goals right away. In addition, the feeling of novelty creates a sense of excitement. As such, users might set too ambitious goals if asked at the start. As a result, a negative experience will ensue when they fail to achieve those goals. Therefore, phased onboarding is crucial. It lets users get accustomed to the app as well as set educated achievable health goals.  

When it comes to baseline data, it is also best to implement a progressive disclosure. Users might not feel comfortable filling out even the basic data such as weight, height, age, and such. They might need to use the app for a while before they develop a sense of trust. Particularly, that their data is securely stored and they have full control of it. 

Wearable app development puts user concerns, psychological needs, and emotional involvement at its core. Therefore, especially if the target user is a person with a chronic illness or a major problem, user sensitivities must be placed at the center of considerations in development. 

Lastly, implementing a toggle between tracking-only or goal modes can be a great solution. It enables users to switch between active goal-achievement to passive monitoring depending on the user’s circumstances and desires. 

Alerts and notifications for Healthcare Wearable App Development

Alerts and notifications should be carefully tailored to the user. After all, if it is a healthy individual using a fitness app to push the boundaries of their physical ability, motivation and excitable language are in order. However, this kind of language might be pressuring and evoke feelings of guilt if the user has a chronic illness and just strives to maintain normal levels of physical activity. Pushy alerts can be good for driven personalities who like a challenge. While others might find empathic language more meaningful to create a positive change in their lives. 

In wearable app development, it is also essential to recognize conditions where urgent alerts can be helpful. Blood glucose monitors can be life-saving for people with low blood sugar levels (e.g. hypoglycemia). A simple alert from an app suggesting eating fast-acting carbs can prevent fainting, seizures, and worse consequences. 

In addition, depending on the app’s purpose, it might make sense to enable connection to a telemedicine for a doctor consultation. 

Personalized recommendations and curated plans

This is where Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are utilized the most. These technologies are perfect for analyzing user data, behavior, and adapting to evolving goals. For instance, an app can analyze an avoidance behavior such as when the user is likely to skip a workout or consume an extra snack. Predicting it allows the app to send a notification to prevent falling out of a regimen. For instance, suggest a lighter exercise, replace the scheduled activity with a longer walk, or remind the user to drink a glass of water or consume an apple. 

In addition, the ML and AI-powered app can adapt to the user’s psychological needs. For instance, for an ambitious personality it can frame it in a gamified version: “Earn 5 more points with a lighter activity – keep your streak alive!”. If the person requires an empathetic approach, the app can send something along the lines “A light 10-minute stretch can relieve tension and ease your mind. You deserve time for yourself”.

The app can also factor in the weather and, for instance, suggest an indoor exercise when the outside weather conditions are bad. Water intake, meal times, sleep patterns and more can and should be personalized for users’ unique behaviors, lifestyles, and contexts. 

Challenges in Healthcare Wearable App Development

Wearable app development revolves around data and so it constitutes the main challenge. It entails: 

• How the data is transmitted and stored, 
• security of its transmission and storage, 
• computational power needed for data processing, and 
• compliance with regulation on handling sensitive data.

Data transmission vs Energy consumption

Sensors transmit data constantly and it requires wireless communication. Wireless communication can become power-intensive if transmission is 24/7. Therefore, SDks allow developers to:

• Batch data – temporarily store it on the device and send over in shorter intervals;
• Adjust sampling frequencies based on an indicator – developers can create algorithms that can use low frequency transmission for less critical indicators while keeping more critical indicators at higher frequencies. For instance, monitor sleep patterns versus heart rate monitoring during an exercise. 
• On-device computing can be utilized to do data average and pre-processing instead of sending raw data frequently. 
• Enabling users to customize the frequency of sampling. For instance, they can set their app to receive data every second or every minute. 
• Creating algorithms to analyze context and adjust sampling frequency based on that. For instance, during sleep, glucose monitors can transmit data with lower frequency. 

Data Transfer, Storage Costs & Security

Even when the frequency of data sampling is adjusted, there still remains the issue of data size. It concerns both simpler metrics like step counter and more nuanced ones like ECG. Device manufacturers can implement some sort of data compression as part of the hardware. However, developers still must aggregate data further. After the data is sent to an app on a phone, data requirements differ based on the app implementation. For instance, privacy-focused apps might store data only on the device. In this case, data transfer and storage do not imply any costs. However, there is still an issue of data size as the device’s storage might be limited. 

If the app implements cloud data storage, then it is a different ball game. First of all, the user incurs data transfer costs to the cloud as by the Internet provider. Then, the app owner usually pays for cloud storage and bandwidth. 

Cloud storage is inalienable functionality if the app’s purpose is to:

• share the data with a medical institution, 
• sync data between all user’s devices, or 
• there is a need for advanced analytics such as ML and AI-powered. 

Additionally, if your app must be HIPAA or GDPR compliant, then using cloud services like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud is a great solution. These cloud providers offer HIPAA- and GDPR-compliant services in terms of encryption, access protocols, and security protocols.

Summary

Healthcare wearable app development is expected to grow and make a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Health management is now at the forefront of concerns among patients, clinics, and the healthcare industry overall involving researchers and insurers. Wearable app development faces the most challenges with data management. These are data transmission, storage, processing, and regulatory compliance. However, modern healthcare app development can utilize modern cloud solutions that are regulatory-compliant in order to provide the most sought-after ML and AI functionalities as well as adjust data size, batch and frequency using SDKs. As such, it enables the developers to implement healthcare-specific dashboards, phased goal-setting, progressive baseline data disclosure, and notifications for a reliable and successful wearable healthcare app.

FAQs about Healthcare Wearable App Development