Anelto telemedicine app for senior care

Anelto makes remote patient monitoring and personal safety technology for seniors. It asked Techcelerant to help build an Android telemedicine app that connects patients to their healthcare providers from wherever they are, gives patients more control over their own care, and makes the relationship between patient and provider more personal. Our developers joined Anelto's engineering team, worked from its existing source code, and solved the networking problems that came with Anelto's custom hardware.

The client

Anelto works on one problem: helping seniors live well by connecting them to healthcare providers from any location. Its products are built to scale, so healthcare organizations of any size can use them, and the team behind them focuses on the needs of a growing elderly population.

John Hurlbert, Anelto's program manager, described the goal like this:

"We have a fully integrated approach and aim to enhance our app's intelligence beyond basic patient vitals and information processing. Telemedicine isn't just teleconferencing; it's about better patient monitoring, cost-avoidance, and overall improved quality of care with real-time feedback."

The problem

Demand for remote healthcare services kept growing, and telemedicine, which grew quickly during the pandemic, was still getting positive feedback from healthcare staff and patients. Anelto wanted an app that went further than video calls. It had to put the right patient and provider information in front of people at the right time, stay within healthcare regulations, and work with the custom hardware Anelto already used to monitor patients.

The brief had three parts:

1. Build a custom telemedicine app that improves patient outcomes and makes patient and provider relationships more personal.
2. Streamline healthcare protocols by deploying that app.
3. Make it a complete resource for patients, with a good user experience.

Hurlbert saw patient independence as the point of the whole project:

"I believe this app promotes patient independence. Allowing patients to take control of their care is crucial—it's their health, and ownership leads to better outcomes."

What we built

The result is an Android app tuned for telemedicine performance and communication. Its main parts are:

• Custom modules that make vital patient and provider information easy to find while keeping the app within regulatory requirements.
• Video tutorials for medical devices such as glucometers, so patients get help using their equipment at home.
• Data sharing between patients and providers, so the information a care plan depends on reaches the provider without delays.

The app lets patients reach their providers conveniently and helps different systems share data with each other. Providers can use it to plan care around the individual patient.

How we worked

Our designers and developers worked as part of Anelto's engineering team. They joined Anelto's regular stand-up meetings and followed its Jira workflow. Anelto gave us its existing app source code from Bitbucket, and we built on that code.

The main technical choices:

• Kotlin, because it is efficient and deploys cleanly inside Android projects.
• The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, which splits the code into modules so later features and updates are easier to add.
• Dagger for dependency injection and Data Binding to connect the interface to the app's data.
• Android SDK API level 30 as the target platform.

The hardest part was the hardware. Anelto uses its own custom devices, and getting the app to talk to them reliably meant fixing networking issues. Hurlbert commented on both the start of the project and that problem:

"I was pleased with Techcelerant's quick start. Our biggest challenge was integrating our custom hardware, but Techcelerant effectively resolved the networking issues."

Results

The original case study has no usage figures, so there are none here. What Anelto did share was feedback from the people using the app. According to Hurlbert, Anelto's clinicians praised the app for solving numerous problems, and Anelto's customers were eager to adopt the new platform:

"Our clinicians have praised the app for solving numerous problems. Our customers are eager to adopt this next-generation platform."

The app gives providers a way to build care around each patient, which was the purpose of the project from the start. Hurlbert summed it up at the end of the project:

"This app is a productivity tool for providers, enhancing patient care by delivering critical data at the right time. It optimizes interoperability and is versatile. This app fosters a more engaging experience for both patients and practitioners, and its impact will only grow. I would work with Techcelerant again."

Working on a healthcare app?

The Anelto app had to stay within healthcare regulations and work with Anelto's own monitoring hardware. If your app has similar constraints, or you have an existing codebase that needs more work, see our mobile app development service or tell us about the project.