2 Oct 2024
How To Build A Health Tracking Device? A Comprehensive Guide
Shaun Bell
The rapidly changing technological landscape has improved every industry, including healthcare, by enabling people to effortlessly track their health and take timely actions in case of alarming news. The pandemic was a game changer for people undermining the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, as it showed them what could go wrong if one takes their health leniently. Over time, the alarming rise in obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disorders has forced the world to open its eyes to the atrocities of unhealthy lifestyles.
Health is subjective to individuals meaning fat people can be healthy, whereas lean people can be suffering from a plethora of health issues. Earlier girls would hit puberty and get their periods after hitting the minimum age of thirteen, but now they can get their periods before they are eight due to the sudden lifestyle changes.
Because of their interaction and reliance on various human, societal, and environmental factors, including lifestyle, genetics, food choices, urbanization, etc., it is challenging to reduce or handle health risks. It’s a world in which our phones have become an extension of ourselves: health-tracking apps revolutionize the approach to wellness. Can you imagine having a personal trainer, nutritionist, and health coach all in the space of your pocket-around-the-clock-and only a few taps away?
These incredible health-tracking applications will help you live a healthy life by tracking meals, providing personalized exercise routines, keeping an eye on sleep habits, and practising meditation. Health apps have emerged as the new trend because they symbolize our hectic lives. We are busy at work, and then there are the family’s needs and the friends.
From Chaos to Clarity: Finding the Right Health App for You
Therefore, it becomes pretty effortless for our health problems to take a back seat since everything competes for our attention. Technology came in the form of these intuitive applications that empower us to take charge of our well-being, things previously unimaginable. From counting the steps to guided workouts and mindfulness sessions, health apps cater to every dimension of one’s journey.
However, how will you pick the best application out of the numerous options crowding the markets? Whether you want to lose some excess pounds, gain some stress management, or maintain a balanced lifestyle, there is an application to see you through. Gone are the one-size-fits-all models of yore; today’s apps offer personalized experiences tailored to your lifestyle and goals. One health app that has taken the world by storm is a health-tracking app that helps individuals track their steps, diet, heartbeats, etc.
With the vast number of apps available, it is overwhelming. It is no surprise that in a digital world, health-tracking applications have become the new compass for mapping our wellness journeys. The application represents a personal health coach in one’s pocket, ready to guide them at each step, heartbeat, and every calorie burn. They have transformed our views of health: setting goals, monitoring and staying motivated as never before. But the benefits go way, way beyond just tracking.
Many apps have social features that create community support and enable you to share achievements and challenges with friends or like-minded individuals. So you might keep seeing how your friend crushes their workout goals or how you get that encouragement when you hit a milestone, reminding you more that you are not alone in your pursuit of health. There are millions of apps in the market, but how do you cut through the noise to find an app to meet your needs?
What Is A Health Tracking App?
Do you hate walking long distances in the name of working out? Can you not calculate your daily steps, bpm, and calories during your health journey? Our lives are moving at the speed of light, making it difficult for us to track how healthy we are. In today’s fast-paced digital world, we lack time to rush to doctors for little inconveniences our health causes, and this is where a health tracking device enters to evolve our world.
A health-tracking app is an innovative technological evolution that has allowed individuals to track their fitness journey through wearable technology integration. These apps can monitor almost everything, from how long a person is active, to their nutrition, sleep, pulse rate, and mood. As these applications enable users to document their daily activities, it becomes easier for them to manage their well-being.
Most health-tracking applications include setting goals, sending reminders features that alarm users when they should take their medications, and reporting their performances. Some of these health-tracking apps rely on personal information to offer recommendations to help individuals make lifestyle decisions. Most health-tracking applications connect with wearable technology like fitness trackers or smart watches to facilitate real-time data integration and tracking.
Such integration ensures that the overall health status of an individual is recorded continuously in a short period. In brief, health tracking applications liberate individuals to make choices about their bodies and health. Regardless of the goal, including wanting to shed weight, gain nutrients, or work out, these devices are the perfect companions in the health task.
Growth Of Health Tracking App In Australia-
After the pandemic onset, health-tracking apps have grown tremendously in Australia and globally due to sudden changes in peoples’ desire to become healthy and live long lives. Who doesn’t want to track their daily activities contributing towards their healthy life? The number of health-tracking applications in Australia has rapidly increased in the last few years.
Currently, about 8 million Australians reported using these apps, and this is 40% higher than in 2020. This growth can be attributed to improving general health awareness and the pandemic’s aftermath that encouraged millions to improve their health. The Australian health app market was estimated at AUD 800 million in 2021 and is predicted to reach over AUD 2 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of approximately 25%.
Thirty-five to forty per cent of users are Gen Z users, while the largest user group is millennials (those between the ages of 25 and 40), who make up forty per cent of the market.
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Market Expansion:
The health tracking market in Australia was worth AUD 800 million in 2021 and is expected to reach above AUD 2 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 25%.
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User Engagement:
The number of Australians who use health-tracking apps regularly has climbed from 5.7 million in 2020 to over 8 million. The increasing emphasis on illness prevention, early detection, and health promotion brought on by COVID-19 infection is responsible for this growth.
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Demographics:
The most active users are young people, with 45% of app users being millennials (at the age of 25-4and 0), and 25% are GenZ (at the age of 18-24). Notably, the percentage of the 50+ population is also growing, with the use of technology for health monitoring by Australians.
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Popular Features:
Prescribe by 60% a weight loss diary, then a minimum of 55% want the ability to analyze how they slept, followed by 75% that would like control over the amount of exercise they get. People value the opportunity to link these applications to devices like activity trackers and wristwatches.
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Health Outcomes:
Current studies show that by tracking their health with mobile health applications, users’ health improves by 30%, and their physical activity rises while they adopt healthier diets.
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Retention Challenges:
Unfortunately, first-time user engagement in those apps is fleeting; nearly half of the individuals cease to use them after six months. Some cited reasons include poor motivation, complicated interfaces, and little feedback.
What Is Google Fit?
Google Fit is an app that you should be inspired by while planning to build a health-tracking app due to its brilliance and user interface. Google Fit is an all-encompassing fitness and health tracking application that follows a user’s different physical activities and their general well-being.
Launched in 2014, it provides an integration point for fitness data across multiple sources like wearables and health applications. The app logs all user activities, like walking, running, cycling, and specific workouts. It measures the calories burned, distances covered, and active minutes.
It measures the calories burned, distances covered, and active minutes. Its compatibility feature provides users a smooth experience irrespective of which device they prefer. Like most competitors, Google Fit focuses on holistic health and provides metrics on heart rate and sleep patterns.
The application enables users to set personal goals for personal improvement and reminds them of an active day, encouraging a healthy lifestyle. Two of the app’s features, “Heart Points” and “Move Minutes,” urge the user to strive for moderate to intense activity levels, thus ensuring cardio is pivotal.
Benefits Of Investing In Creation Of Health Tracking Apps-
Developing an app that could track one’s health has advantages for users and the team that creates the app. Apps like Google Fit are a boon from heaven for people looking to improve their health by tracking their calories and exercise routines.
The tremendous success achieved by Google Fit has encouraged app development companies and developers to invest in creating similar health-tracking apps to help individuals meet their daily goals.
The global growth of individuals taking up fitness and health journey challenges has sparked a surge in demand for innovative solutions, thus leading to the development of innovative technology-driven solutions like fitness tracking apps.
1. Empowering Users-
Wouldn’t you love it if you could track your daily calorie intake and workout routines? Earlier people had to track their calorie intake manually, but thanks to the invention of health-tracking apps, one can effortlessly track whatever they want by wearing a smartwatch. A health-tracking app puts people in total control of their health destiny.
By enabling users to check the vital signs and trends, including the contents of their heart, physical activity, sleep and diet, the mentioned applications have increased awareness and self-control in matters concerning health. This syndication can improve general health and can cause a healthier choice of dietary and physical activity habits.
2. Data-Driven Insights
Won’t you work harder to achieve your fitness goals, if you knew how much more you have to perform to complete your daily fitness goals? With innovative health tracking devices, you can set your daily workout goals and complete them effortlessly. Their data analysis yields benefits for the users by allowing for personalized outcomes.
In this way, the user will be presented with particular exercises or diet changes, based on an analysis of patterns and trends in their app usage. This approach contributes to increasing the target audience’s engagement with the application and the effectiveness of using the app to achieve the necessary health results.
3. Increased Health Engagement-
Health tracking apps allow users to engage with the app by making it convenient to track their movements, calories, heartbeat irregularities, etc., thus promoting accountability. These apps encourage users to make informed lifestyle choices, affecting their well-being. Health tracking apps use quirky methods like streaks, rewards, etc., to engage with their users and motivate them to complete their daily goals.
This strategy, which involves setting goals and offering incentives, promotes health management and can be incorporated into the application. Such user engagement means better outcomes since users will continue healthy habits when motivated to track progress and compete with friends. Hire a reputable app development company to help you integrate the latest industry trends in your fitness apps.
4. Preventative Healthcare-
The best aspect of developing a health-tracking app is its ability to help individuals diagnose health issues before they become alarming, where no one can do anything to save them. Imagine you track your daily BPM, then won’t you notice if there is an irregularity in them and seek help immediately?
The use of health monitoring applications along with technology has a significant part in preventive medicine. Users can use the features to change their lifestyle and habits responsible for making them sick to more positive ones as they remain healthy. Since costs are covered upfront, this strategy can reduce healthcare costs and enhance public health.
5. Integration With Healthcare Providers-
Isn’t it nice that you can approach a doctor for consultation any time you want, thanks to the development of health tracking apps? Since many people use fitness-tracking apps on their smartphones to track their daily calories and workout sessions, creating a health-tracking application, which integrates healthcare providers can improve the quality of services.
It is possible to share the data users tracked during their workouts with their doctors and get a better insight, thus developing better treatment plans. Such a relationship may lead to increased effective control of chronic diseases and enhanced patient status. A reputable app development company can help you collaborate with the industry giants.
6. Market Demand And Revenue-
The prime reason behind a person’s interest in developing any app is revenue generation, which depends on user demand. Currently, health-tracking apps are in massive demand among users due to the convenience and speed they offer users. Toward this end, given the industry has an enormous range of established and emerging digital health tools, a large market opportunity is available.
Continued market development and health services demand calls for developing novel health technology solutions that can result in enhanced revenues from a health tracking app. A few models like subscription-based services, infusing funds from collaborated healthcare organizations can also add to revenue.
7. Community Building-
While trying to lose or gain weight, a community that motivates you to do better is pivotal, and fitness tracking apps help you achieve it without spending a fortune. The mobile health tracking application can be socially enabling to users. Customer engagement tools like forums or group challenges make it easy for user communities to form and hence provide incentives to keep users motivated and on track with the health goals they’ve set to achieve.
Altogether, developing a health-tracking application satisfies the emerging demand from paying users by helping improve people’s overall health and society’s well-being. This area has the possibility of innovation and financial returns making it an attractive venture in the digital health space.
How One Can Develop A Health-Tacking Mobile Application-
Building an application that tracks your fitness level, such as Google Fit, requires much effort. The goal of the app will mostly depend on several market-available elements, including the produced app’s simplicity of use and technical prowess. Like any other profession, app development companies and developers work differently, but the following are similar when working on an app after launch.
As a rule, it takes a significant amount of time and cash to develop a fitness software that could be comparable to Google Fit, mainly if the talented group of engineers, designers, content strategists, and marketers participates. The anticipated cost and time will depend on various parameters, including offline access, features and recommendations, work complexity and the number of developers assigned to the project.
1. Planning And Research-
If you are planning to start creating an app, you need to understand the basis of app development, including the starting phase, involving deep research into market trends and technologies that can help your app gain users’ attention once launched in the market. Start by studying your competitors and researching their target audience, marketing strategies, etc., to understand how to stand apart from them in the market.
Once you have researched your competitor’s game plan, start finalizing your target audience, as it will help you determine the feature you want to offer your users. Apart from finalizing your target users, and marketing strategies, you need to finalize your primary idea behind the gap and what gaps will be bridged once released.
You need to understand a bright idea alone won’t help your app become successful among users. Hire a reputable app development company to help you know whether your app will work once launched and what you can change to improve.
2. Design A User-Interface-
User Interface is another pivotal aspect that determines whether the app will succeed or fail after its launch among users. Once you have decided on your idea, start working on offering an intuitive, clean user interface with effortless navigation to users, as it is responsible for enhancing user experience.
A user won’t stay for long on your app if you offer complex navigation with a boring user interface but will persist if your app has a visually appealing design with effortless navigation. Apart from making the app good-looking, a user-friendly design simplifies how health parameters can be measured, thus increasing the chances of people staying focused and committed to the solution offered by the application.
Emphasizing usability will create a good impression for users on the app, leading to higher retention rates and satisfaction levels. A user interface’s ability to load quickly is another crucial component that keeps users interested.
3. Select Technical Stack-
The first point is choosing the right technology stack for app performance, scalability, and user experience. The process of making such a choice usually begins by analyzing specific requirements of an app, such as the target platforms to be supported or whether it should run on iOS, Android, or both, have real-time tracking, data synchronization, and other desired features.
For the front-end part, you want frameworks that provide responsive and intuitive design for how users interact with the app. On the back end, choose technologies for effective management of storage, processing, and integration of third-party APIs. In addition, you must consider aspects like community support and documentation as easy maintenance to guarantee sustainability in the development.
4. Choose Your Features–
Choosing the right features for your app is equally important to ensure it becomes successful among users. Making a list of attributes is a complex process of identifying the app’s goals and the needs of the audience that will use it. The app’s primary purpose is to improve exercise, nutrition, or the treatment of chronic diseases, so start by figuring out what those objectives are.
Think through different user cases meaning how the users will use the app in day-to-day living. It focuses on those functionalities, which are valuable and add to its usability, and at the same time, it is easy to use. Talk to the target users and stakeholders about what they want and need in your app, to deliver the value they want.
5. Testing-
Ensuring your solutions are error-free, user-friendly, and compatible with all the platforms you intend to utilize requires extensive testing before release. Transferring data and history is a part of this step in creating fitness tracking software, so a robust plan for secure transfer is necessary. For a safe, comprehensive plan on moving data from old systems to new ones, work with a mobile app development company with an effective staff.
The group will perform comprehensive testing, including automation tests that streamline tedious procedures and analyse individual components, integration tests that examine how app components interact, and user acceptance tests that determine whether or not customer expectations are being met.
6. Launch –
This is another pivotal phase in developing a health-tracking app, as it ensures that the app reaches its intended audience effectively, providing them with the tools they need to monitor and improve their health. After you have rigorously tested your app and are satisfied with the results, hire a mobile app development company to launch your health-tracking app with a bang. While the first advantage of a good launch is the ability to tell others about it and how it works, a successful launch essentially allows the next customers to download and use it. This phase triggers constant feedback mechanisms, user support and updates that define the apps’ success in the health and wellness market. Marketing your app is equally pivotal to reaching your target audience, so before launching the app decide on how you will advertise it to ensure it reaches broader users.
7. Ongoing Maintenance-
Maintaining your app has a massive impact on its performance since users are likely to continue with programs that are updated frequently and have problem fixes applied. Users fall in love with apps that consider their feedback and needs. You need to watch user feedback and update your app accordingly to ensure your users stay rather than moving to the next best thing available in the market.
A health-tracking app’s ongoing success depends on its support and upkeep for mobile apps. The deployment of updates, user feedback, and ongoing performance metrics monitoring are essential tactics for improving security, maintaining competitiveness, and providing a user-friendly product in a dynamic market. Hire a leading Android mobile app development company to update and maintain your app.
Core Features for User Experience
1. Onboarding Process-
To become a member and create an account the users must provide their social network accounts, e-mail, or other identities. With such an ID, users can put their preferences and trigger personalization each time they engage in an application or service. You can ask the user for their preferences, favourite material, and content based on their behaviour and interests if you include a registration option. You can provide them access to other exclusive services and goods, like discounts or exclusive offers.
Your feeling of improving customer satisfaction will be in the individual and the communication approach of using the app. As for introducing new impressive features into your application, the only turning point is the professional application developers. You can hire a reputable React native mobile app development company to help you develop your dream app.
2. Search Functionality-
Your Google-Fit-like software needs to have browse and search features to help users browse and search the content they need effortlessly. Ensure that it possesses a friendly user interface with search options which enable the user to search for workout information, a search bar, a tab to filter results, and brilliant workout and recipe videos.
Categories, tags, and suggested workouts displayed alongside the surfing experience are generated from the user’s preferences and surfing history. The multi-system search categories can be sorted based on the quantity of downloads, relevancy, and date of recent uploads.
3. Activity Tracking-
Tracking activity with strong capabilities should form the baseline for an application addressing health tracking. In such an application, users should be able to log their daily steps, distance covered, or calories burnt. The addition of workout support for running, cycling, and strength training, among others, lets users vary their fitness regime as per their preference. Outdoor recreation demands the functionality of GPS, which can monitor any path or distance, thus making the performance metrics more accurate.
4. Nutrition Logging-
The service enables more people to develop a better awareness of their health, and personal goals in terms of health, including complete food diaries that help users willing to control diets better. The application will enable users to easily record what they eat by scanning the barcodes of the food products or manually entering them, thus making it effortless for users to measure the exact food taken in.
A robust database of foods with detailed nutrients such as calories, macronutrients, and vitamins will enable users to make better decisions over diet. Features like meal suggestions based on dietary choices, like low-carb or vegetarian, and integration with meal plans are possible to keep people interested.
5. Hydration Tracking-
Hydration is fundamental to general well-being and health. A committed feature the app would provide is reminding users to log the water they intake. This type of reminder would increase awareness about hydration during the day.
The app can offer customised reminders at intervals to remind users to drink water regularly, thus helping to combat forgetfulness. The instant feedback of progress bars or colourful graphs related to hydration can be visual to convey hydration levels, providing a sense of accomplishment of daily goals, thus maximizing motivation.
6. Sleep Tracking-
Quality sleep plays a pivotal role in health and general well-being. If you plan to create a health-tracking app, include a sleep-tracking feature. This feature will help track sleep durations and quality, including data related to light sleep, deep sleep, and REM.
This analysis can inform the app on how best to present recommendations and insights that guide the user in enhancing sleep hygiene or finding the optimal bedtime routine, environmental adjustment, or relaxation technique. This feature can alert the users when their sleep habits are abnormal to help detect potential problems early.
7. Integration With Wearables-
The health app can boast good tracking capabilities if it supports popular wearables, such as a fitness tracker or smartwatch. Such integration will ensure data transmission without hindrance and enable users to combine their health metrics into one place, thus giving them a clearer view of their general well-being.
When this information related to heart rate, activity levels, or sleep patterns is synced with wearables, the app can provide deeper insights and personalized recommendations. Additionally, by prompting users to reflect on their accomplishments thus far, these gadgets’ updates serve as a constant reminder to stay engaged and inspired towards their fitness goals. A brilliant React Native app development company can help you integrate wearable technology into your app.
8. Reminders And Notifications-
Reminders for working out, meals, hydration, and medication use play a pretty good role in encouraging users to stick to their routines about health. Alerts from the application, including alerts about inactivity, may remind users to move or hydrate to create healthier habits throughout the day.
These reminders can be tailored to specific preferences and schedules so they never appear intrusive. By reinforcing the right behaviours and stimulating timely actions, the application can increase user engagement in ways compatible with long-term commitment to health and wellness goals.
What Is The Cost Of Building A Health-Tracking App?
The development cost for building a health tracking app in Australia depends on various elements — the features of an app, platform (iOS and Android), and team experience. The general range is about AUD 50,000, and it can run to an excess of AUD 250,000 or even more.
1. Features And Complexity-
Wellness tracking runs a spectrum in features and complexity: more basic health-centric apps (steps, calories, reminders etc.) classify on the low end with wearable devices, advanced analytics, and telehealth features add costs for building more complex functionalities. An app with primary features is affordable akin to apps with advanced features. Hire a leading Android app development company to help you navigate the costs of features you want to integrate into your app.
2. Platform-
A two-in-one app costs double that single platform only. Cross-platform development tools are equivalent alternatives to writing in distinct languages for multiple platforms but do not always deliver the same performance and user experience.
3. Design-
Users must receive an efficiently designed UI and UX for health applications. While custom designs take a longer time and budget, template designs can be cost-effective.
4. Remote Work-
Developing your system in Australia is usually more expensive than outsourcing to countries where labour is cheaper. However regional teams have the advantage of being proficient at communicating, in sync with your time zone and locals’ regulations.
Post-Launch-
1. Maintenance and Updates:
After launch, the app needs maintenance, updates, and additional features (if it is part of the future roadmap) and can incur around 15-20% of the initial development cost every year. Hire an Android app development company to help you plan strategies to promote your app post-launch.
Ultimately, creating a health tracking app in Australia will require a significant financial commitment, which will peak when your needs and project scope have been well defined. Planning and understanding your target market are essential for success in a crowded market.
Conclusion–
So, creating a health-tracking application is worthwhile work that can positively change the user’s life. When choosing the concept of user-centred design, you develop an interface that is natural to use and pleasant to the eye, thus pushing users to change their behaviour for healthier.
This is made feasible by using strong data analytics, which allows customers to see health trends and make decisions. Furthermore, data privacy raises the confidence level needed for health applications or programs.
7 Pillars, a reputable mobile app development company, can help you understand industry trends and integrate the latest technologies in your app.
Further, do not rule out opportunities for entertaining features, or social distributability to develop incentives, such as games and challenges to health-related goals. Most importantly, different types of health technology change over time, leading to innovations that will help upgrade your app.
Investing in a health tracking app is, in essence, investing in healthcare’s future. It enables individuals to take charge of their health and work on improving it before they reach an alarming phase.
You may create React Native mobile apps with a unique feature set by working with 7 Pillars, a reliable mobile app development company. Therefore, stop searching and connect with our team at 7 Pillars right now, if you’re thinking about developing CRM solutions for your healthcare facility.
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