Smartcardia: Technology that saves lives

Using technology to make a positive impact on society is an aspiration that any company would like to achieve. Even more so if it serves to save lives. At Secuoyas we are fortunate to be able to participate in this adventure.

Industry
- Health
Client
- Smartcardia
Skills
- Design system
- Product development
- Technology and DevOps
- Visual design
- Visual identity design
Team
- 2 x Design
- 2 x Development
- 2 x DevOps
- 1 x Project Management
Date
- From 2021

ECG Patch for remote monitoring of cardiological patients

Smartcardia is a Swiss startup that has developed a revolutionary remote monitoring device for patients with heart disease. It consists of three elements:

A Patch that attaches to the chest of patients and that, thanks to its high precision, is able to detect any type of arrhythmia or cardiac anomaly.
A mobile App that receives all the information from the device via Bluetooth in real time and prepares it to send it to the cloud.
A Cloud Platform aimed at doctors and technicians, through which they can monitor all patients and receive alerts in the event of any anomaly.

The beginnings

What we found when we entered the project

Smartcardia comes to us in early 2021. By that time, the device is patented and begins to receive authorisations to operate in some European countries and in India. It is there that they conduct their first tests with patients and begin to generate their first revenues.

However, from a digital product point of view, there is still a long way to go.

A very basic design system that is not being implemented consistently in the App or in the Cloud Platform. Not having a stable design team, the responsibility for its maintenance and propagation falls on the developers.
The technical team is small and progress is slow. They barely have the capacity to respond to the first needs that arise in the commercialisation of the product.
At an infrastructure level, there is very little built, requiring manual processes that are not very operational.
There is no Agile methodology.

Consolidation of the Design System

The first thing we did was a detailed analysis of the existing Design System and an inventory of all its elements and components. We saw how it was being applied to the product and identified the necessary improvement points.

The decision was to completely overhaul the system to adapt it to the new needs of both business and technology. This work took six months and allowed us to create a solid base on which to build new evolutions of the product.

Brand extension

Once we had the Design System as a base, we worked on the design and development of Smartcardia's corporate website. A complete renovation, with a modern and clean design, a new information architecture and a focus on explaining in a clear and detailed way the product, its technical specifications and its advantages.

We have also completely renewed the graphic material for trade fairs and events that Smartcardia attends all over the world.

And more recently we have updated the design of the App that links the patch to the Cloud platform.

Now we can say that Smartcardia has completely revamped its brand and has taken a giant leap to gain credibility and differentiation over its competitors.

An efficient and scalable infrastructure

The other major area of action was the infrastructure of the cloud platform. The starting point was a platform that required a lot of work every time we wanted to update the product, as it was a manual and tedious process, carried out by the same team that did the development. We focused the first few months on understanding the code, the use of resources and the technical needs for the future. We explored different strategies, technologies and we decided to deploy the platform on Kubernetes, being more agile when deploying different components in different environments and becoming cloud provider agnostic. From that moment on we have been deploying services and creating development, staging and production environments. The development team only has to worry about getting new features out while the infrastructure team makes them available in the different environments very quickly.

Joining forces

The result of combining Smartcardia's strengths (its differential product and in-depth knowledge of the Health sector), with Secuoyas' experience and capabilities of more than 20 years designing and developing digital products, can only yield positive results.

We have been able to put together a team of 13 people with different skills and disciplines, but who are characterised by a clear vision of the direction of the product.

Today, Secuoyas brings Design, Development, DevOps and Project Management and is optimistic about a future full of possibilities.