Building a heart-monitoring app in today's digital fitness industry, where innovation fuels growth and profit, is a promising venture. The rise of wearables and monitoring apps, especially for heart health, highlights a growing interest in this niche.
So, what exactly does it take to create a heart-monitoring product that succeeds in a competitive market?
Mind Studios has been working with fitness and healthcare software projects for over ten years now, and today, our portfolio contains thriving products like Fitr and Envol.
In this article, we apply our experience to guide you through the process of heart rate tracking app development, highlighting their significance, emphasizing the potential app’s key features, and sharing best practices. And if you already know the basics and are looking for a tech partner, feel free to request a consultation with our experts.
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Highlights
- Revenue from health monitoring apps was estimated at $8.2 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $35.7 billion by 2030.
- Key features to keep in mind if you decide to build a heart rate tracking app include heart rate tracking, real-time ECG monitoring, interactive educational materials, and notifications.
- For enhanced data accuracy, 24/7 monitoring, and improved overall convenience, heart rate measuring apps need to be integrated with wearables. For more in-depth insights on heart rate measurement app development — keep reading.
Significance and relevance of heart monitoring apps
As wearables gain popularity worldwide, their diversity grows, expanding the range of possible applications for these devices and their monitoring functions. According to Statista’s survey in September 2023, around 41% of respondents in the US stated that they use wearable devices in their households.
[Source: Statista]
When it comes to health monitoring tools, the biggest priority always goes to heart rate-measuring apps. There are several reasons why they are so significant:
- Early health issue detection. With effective comparison dashboards, heart rate monitoring software shows your heart activity patterns and lets you stay alert about any suspicious fluctuations during physical activity. This way, you can consult with a specialist and spot early signals of potential arrhythmia, high blood pressure, etc.
- Monitoring the existing issues. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 6 million adults in America live with a diagnosed heart failure. Patients with such conditions need exercising to lower the risks of hospitalization. The best way to keep them safe during such activity is to let them monitor their heart and stay within the normal pace for their health.
- Maximum training personalization. For people who aim to reach heights as fitness enthusiasts, heart rate monitors can help adjust the training session to specific goals. Regulating the training intensity based on heart rate will help athletes focus on what they want most without endangering themselves.
Key features of a heart monitoring app
Although heart rate measurement app development may sound obvious in terms of what functionality the app should contain, let’s take a look at the key features that make great heart monitoring software.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Heart rate tracking | The namesake feature allows users to access heart activity indicators from sensors on a wearable device and view them in convenient and customizable dashboards. The required measurements are BPM (heartbeat per minute), heart rate variability (HRV), pulse zones, and heart rate training zones. |
| Real-time ECG monitoring | This feature provides users with a 24/7 Electrocardiogram (ECG) to help monitor and detect heart issues at any given time. It consists of small tests that record the electrical heart activity to be used in future diagnosis. For example, ECG helps detect signs of coronary heart disease and abnormal heart rhythms and has been reported to be superior to other methods of detecting cardiac arrhythmia. |
| Interactive educational materials | Not every user knows what a healthy heart rate should be in a calm state or after a 10-minute run. So, it’s always helpful for an app to have features that aim to educate users on the normal heart rate after or during certain activities and even adjust the “ideal” numbers to a person's condition. |
| Notifications | To ensure users promptly notice any significant changes in their heart rate, the heart rate monitoring app should include an alerting feature that takes into account the health data provided and notifies users when their measurements go outside healthy ranges. |
Best practices for heart monitoring app development
As a software development company that specializes in both healthcare and fitness apps, we have a lot to say about what you should focus on while building your own heart rate monitoring app.
Firstly, you want your app to be both convenient and informative to the users while ensuring the security of their information.
Secondly, your app must comply with the healthcare standards related to heart monitoring and data security. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In this section, we’ll look closer at how to make a heart rate app meet these standards and not overlook user-friendliness and accessibility along the way.
If you want to get a development strategy based on your specific heart-monitoring app idea, reach out to discuss possible collaboration options with our experts.
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design
When developing a heart monitoring app, it is important to consider the context in which an app will be used and then adapt its interface accordingly. This approach will ensure that your app is both functional and user-friendly under specific conditions.
Pro tip! If you are developing an app for runners, adding quick access to the most important information on the go would be beneficial. Runners often focus on their exercise or navigate their route, and they need to glance quickly at the app and get vital information about their heart rate or distance covered without any disruption.
At Mind Studios, we’re dedicated to ensuring our health apps are easy and seamless to use and effectively serve their direct purpose. That’s why we typically test them with the target users, making sure everything from the onboarding process to the design meets their needs for a smooth, intuitive experience.
Integration with wearable devices
Wearable device integration is a powerful add-on to the success of heart monitoring applications. Among the main benefits are data accuracy, 24/7 monitoring, real-time notifications, and enhanced overall convenience.
With the help of smartwatches, bracelets, fitness trackers, etc., your app constantly monitors users’ heart health states and immediately alerts them about any significant changes or potential risks. Powered by advanced algorithms and the newest sensors, they become a great assistant and let you provide all the metrics accurately and thoroughly.
The biggest benefit of integrating wearable devices into your heart rate tracking app is, without a doubt, seamless data synchronization. With this technology, your users will forget about having to insert their data manually and will be provided with a better user experience and seamless data exchange.
Ensuring regulatory compliance
Health information is considered sensitive data in most parts of the world. Depending on the region your app operates in, there are mandatory regulations and standards it should specifically comply with.
In the US, these include:
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Essential for apps processing PHI, ensuring they safeguard privacy and security of health data to enter the US market;
- The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA): Regulates apps diagnosing or treating medical conditions. Apps functioning as medical devices require FDA approval.
In Europe, there are:
- The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Protects personal information, requiring apps to obtain user consent for data processing, ensure transparent data handling, and implement robust security measures;
- The Medical Device Regulation (EU MDR and IVDR): Similar to the FDA, these regulations mandate compliance for apps that qualify as medical devices for distribution within the European Union.
Mind Studios has successfully completed healthcare projects that required compliance with health data protection regulations like HIPAA.
So if you need help ensuring your platform is compliant with relevant standards, reach out to us for guidance.
Data encryption
Data encryption is essential for regulatory compliance, without which your heart rate tracking app cannot obtain the necessary approvals for legal distribution. It plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of your user’s sensitive information and makes it less prone to data leaks.
Therefore, to protect the privacy and integrity of data transmitted between sensors and software, your heart monitoring app must employ encryption.
Interoperability
To make your heart rate monitoring app user-centered and convenient, we recommend enhancing its interoperability by ensuring user data is “portable.” Consider initially designing your app to be interoperable with other popular fitness and healthcare platforms and medical devices to achieve seamless synchronization between different useful sources.
For example, you can integrate your app with platforms like Apple HealthKit, Google Fit, and Fitbit. Mind Studios team can help you target the right integrations for your specific audience and region by identifying the most relevant platforms and devices for your app.
Additionally, incorporating an export feature that allows users to select their preferred data format can significantly enhance user-friendly data sharing and transfers.
Heart monitoring app development cost
Generally, heart rate measuring apps can be divided into three categories based on their complexity:
- Low-complexity apps contain a minimum of custom features and complicated design solutions, and take around two months to develop;
- Medium-complexity apps have more solutions that add steps to development and therefore increase development time; this kind of app takes around six months to develop;
- Complex apps include various custom-built features of higher complexity and take more than eight months to develop.
If your app doesn’t require integrating more complex features than wearable integration and convenient presentation of the required metrics, it can be placed into a medium complexity category.
Let’s compare hiring a US-based outsourcing team with hiring a Ukrainian team like Mind Studios in terms of rates.
| Location | Average hourly rate | Heart-tracking app development cost |
|---|---|---|
| USA | $150 | $216,000 |
| Mind Studios (Ukraine) | $45 | $64,800 |
The table above provides minimal average calculations for a heart rate monitoring app of medium complexity, which takes around six months (or 1440 billable hours) to build.
However, this is a very approximate estimate of the costs to create a heart tracker app, made without diving into the details of your specific idea. For a more accurate estimate, feel free to contact our team for a consultation.
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Mind Studios' experience
With our extensive expertise in developing healthcare app solutions, we are well-equipped to create a successful heart-tracking app from scratch.
To illustrate our capabilities, we’d like to showcase an app that combines features of health, wellness, and habit-tracking platforms.
We are talking about Envol, a holistic healing assistant that we developed for our European partners. The app aims to provide people who are recovering from chronic illnesses and injuries with holistic practices backed by medical research to make their path easier.
Our clients, Julie Morin and Tim van Driessche, came to us with an idea to transform the best healing advice and practices Julie experienced during her recovery journey into a convenient and inclusive digital assistant.
As a result, we’ve rebuilt the app from scratch, made it available on both iOS and Android and managed to successfully migrate users from the old app.
“The feedback we are getting from users is amazing and everybody loves the design and flow of the app. Mind Studios delivered a state of the art app.”
— Tim van Driessche, co-founder of Envol
Now, Envol is showing great results with more than 8,000 active users and a retention rate of 43%. We continue working on Envol upgrades and new features to bring more value to people who struggle with chronic illnesses all over the world.
Conclusion
In summary, to build a successful heart rate monitoring app, we recommend keeping it simple and user-oriented. Here are the key points you should consider when building a heart-tracking app:
- Present the data your app collects in a well-structured and organized way.
- Guide your users with intuitive UX and UI design.
- Consider integrating with wearable devices to target even more users.
- Provide a real-time alerting system for potential risks related to analyzed data.
- Give your users the information to understand their bodies better by integrating educational materials.
- Ensure regulatory compliance with every required institution based on the region in which your app aims for distribution.
- Protect the data your app uses with the best security measures.
In case you have any questions about building a heart-monitoring app and outshining the competitors with a top-notch product, let us know. Fill out the contact form, and our experts will get back to you to schedule a free 45-minute consultation to discuss your ideas and the best ways to implement them.
