About

Who we are

Hello 👋🏻. This iOS project is intended to leverage the convenience of mobile application to track outcomes after injections for back pain.

It is the main focus of one of the studies at the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UCSF and was undertaken as a URAP project at Berkeley, where I was responsible for developing the app from conception to launch (technically, beta testing) under the guidance of Dr. Patricia Zheng.

Technologies

It utilizes UIKit from Apple’s mobile SDK as well as the third-party frameworks: ResearchKit, an open source framework for administering flexible, health-based survey tasks and Google’s Firebase SDK for database and authentication. A bit of Node.js was used for creating Cloud Functions for remote notifications as well. And this site was created and deployed on Github Pages using this Jekyll template.

Given our time constraints and my 1+ years time commitment to this URAP project, there was no need to reinvent the wheel and keep up with monthly costs of web servers and hosting. Interfacing with Google’s Firebase services was ideal because of the low barrier to entry and cost, which is perfect for these types of minimum viable products.

Moving Forward

During this testing and maintenance period, our goal is to continue to optimize the application as it rolls out to on-site testing for clinical use.

Our roadmap is available here, or you can navigate to it via the above links. The app is currently in beta testing, but if you have any questions of suggestions, feel free to reach out via email.