Developing Apps for Researching the COVID-19 Pandemic with the TrackYourHealth Platform

TL;DR

This paper introduces TrackYourHealth, a flexible mobile platform that rapidly supports COVID-19 research apps, addressing challenges like privacy, compliance, and development effort in the medical app domain.

Contribution

The paper presents the design and deployment of a modular, configurable platform enabling quick development of COVID-19 related health apps, overcoming typical development and regulatory challenges.

Findings

Two COVID-19 related apps developed in weeks

Platform supports multi-platform deployment

Addresses privacy and regulatory compliance

Abstract

Through lockdowns and other severe changes to daily life, almost everyone is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists and medical doctors are - among others - mainly interested in researching, monitoring, and improving physical and mental health of the general population. Mobile health apps (mHealth), and apps conducting ecological momentary assessments (EMA) respectively, can help in this context. However, developing such mobile applications poses many challenges like costly software development efforts, strict privacy rules, compliance with ethical guidelines, local laws, and regulations. In this paper, we present TrackYourHealth (TYH), a highly configurable, generic, and modular mobile data collection and EMA platform, which enabled us to develop and release two mobile multi-platform applications related to COVID-19 in just a few weeks. We present TYH and highlight specific challenges researchers and developers of similar apps may also face, especially when developing apps related to the medical field.