HealthPal

Summary:

The rapid growth and rise of technology has affected human life in many different ways – mostly, for the better. Smartphones, smart watches and other wearable devices have become highly prominent​ and offer a vast array of potentially useful applications. Some of those devices are great at helping people manage their daily lives – from scheduling to “Smart Home” assistance – the users are given a multitude of options, including health monitoring and tackling daily activities. Modern
smartwatches open up numerous new possibilities and allow us monitor physical activities and obtain valuable real-time feedback.

HealthPal is a new smartphone application which aims to improve and promote a healthy lifestyle for its users. Unlike the typical fitness trackers that focus mostly on
activity and exercise patterns, our project also ventures into the field of health analysis, cardiovascular monitoring and polysomnography (sleep pattern study).

With the inclusion of smart emergency detection and emergency alert systems, we also try to find a way to reduce the amount of fatal accidents and deaths due to unattended heart attacks. Cardiovascular disease is the leading global cause of death, accounting for more than 17.3 million deaths per year in 2013, a number that is expected to grow to more than 23.6 million by 2030​ . In addition, there are millions of elderly people who may need emergency care​. Most of them cannot remain under constant human supervision all the time and require smart autonomous monitoring and quick response system to any emergency situations.

HealthPal offers a simple solution that provides health, activity and sleep monitoring, automated and manual emergency alerts, as well as geolocation services for a rapid emergency response.

From ‘Smart Health Tracker’ to HealthPal

According to the CDC ​ “every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack”. The amount of people who die every year due to the cardiovascular diseases while being unable to reach hospital in an emergency is vast. People are also often not aware of their health and whether the activities they perform affect their condition; this cannot be controlled by the government or any private health organizations since a majority of those accidents cannot be predicted.

Originally, this project (named ‘Smart Health Tracker’) aimed to provide a wearable device that would keep a track of the user’s everyday activities and provide the relevant feedback. It would trace heartbeat, blood pressure and other vital signs and send a notification to emergency services in case of an accident or a heart attack.

However, once our team started exploring potential customer segments, we saw the need for a more lightweight, easy to use solution that would provide greater functionality. Thinking about people who are unable to reach the emergency services lead us to travelers and mountain climbers who visit uninhabited, often dangerous places. Exploring the area of chronic diseases and elder care facilities in turn provided us with the idea of remote monitoring and expanding the emergency alerts to include user’s families or trusted friends. These changes were also introduced after our team has conducted qualitative interviews​.

With this in mind our team shifted the focus from a highly specialized wearable device to the development of a robust and wide-encompassing application called “​ HealthPal” ​.

Business analysis:

The Customers

Our potential customers include busy parents and professionals in search of an efficient and easy way to monitor their health. We also focus on athletes looking for a simple and easy application to track their activities, or people with busy schedules who can’t take proper care of their elderly/sick relatives without constant monitoring or aid from caretakers. Finally, our biggest customer segment are the people with chronic illnesses and cardiovascular diseases who require frequent check-ups and a smart emergency alert system in case of a heart attack or other dangerous and possibly fatal situations. We believe that the project is useful and applicable to all the customers that are concerned about their health. It is suited for families, friends, relatives or doctors taking care of a person who may need help in an emergency.

The Features

HealthPal provides many features in a single application. We are more keen towards health issues because we believe that this should be our primary focus and also strive to offer a product which is affordable and useful. We also aim to incorporate many innovative features in the field of smart wearable technology, since the ease of use and smart wireless notifications are highly popular​.

The main features of HealthPal are health monitoring, geolocation services and intelligent alert system for emergencies. It will also include additional options such as sleep pattern analysis and exercise activity tracking.

Our goal is to make HealthPal as useful as possible, while keeping in mind the main objective of improving and potentially even saving lives.

Revenue Stream

HealthPal has three main revenue streams:

• Basic functionality of the app is free for the users but will be served with ads. These ads will earn money for the company.
• The second revenue model for our project includes charging the consumers €10/year for the ad-free application. Remote reports & analysis add-on will cost the users €5/month. This model can also include selling licenses to our APIs to third parties under certain terms and conditions.
• The other one consists of commissions from partner institutes such as hospitals or elder care facilities that shall be encouraging their patients to use HealthPal for a healthy  lifestyle and in order to track their daily activities for development of better and personalized schedules.

Costumer relationship

In order to develop a good relationship with our clients, HealthPal will strive to provide the best possible experience and rapid, free customer support. We begin as a startup project and will continue to work with the customer feedback so that we can improve the quality of our product even further.

Key Activities

We have made it our primary focus to create a product which will satisfy all of the users’ needs; for this reason we encourage the product development strategy to promote incorporation of new and innovative ideas. It is also important to study and be up to date on related medical research in order to maintain the quality of the feedback.

The project also require an extensive and robust server infrastructure since the acquire data should be aggregated and processed in real time which leads to a heavy and resource consuming technical maintenance.

Key Partners

Since HealthPal primarily focuses on health related issues, a partnership with doctors and hospitals can help us reach out to their patients and encourage them to use HealthPal for a variety of reasons. In order to expand more in the market, partnership with the sports associations and travel agencies can directly take us to the users who lead adventurous lives such as mountain bikers, travelers or hikers. HealthPal app should support multi-platform approach, so collaboration with tech-companies that are proficient in app  development and smart wearable technology, such as Google or Apple, can also be highly beneficial.

Cost structure

The cost of this project has a mixture of a cost driven and a value driven structure. Since our team has no prior established infrastructure we aim to reduce the cost of the development and apply a lean approach with outsourcing and cost savings. At the same time we greatly cherish our customers and the value that HealthPal brings, so we put intense focus and expanses on customer service and satisfaction.

Team:

Archana Wale

Maxim Ivanisov

Sandeep Singh Karwal

Santosh Kumar Sah