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Chronic diseases afflict patients for many years. One way to decrease the burden of chronic disease care on the healthcare system is to have patients self-manage their disease. The ubiquity of smartphones presents a great opportunity for making self-management easier. This is an active research area, but the lack of appropriate software solutions compels many researchers to design and develop their systems from scratch. In this dissertation, we propose a novel and flexible software platform for the development of disease management research applications. Our platform is novel in the sense that a comprehensive platform similar to ours does not exist. We have considered a broad list of functional and non-functional features to support the most common research scenarios. To demonstrate the functionality of this platform, we have developed two representative applications—one for breast cancer risk assessment research and another one for post-surgical care research. Our initial studies show that our platform greatly facilitates the development process of such applications. The platform helps in considerably reducing the required development time by providing many ready-to-reuse features and ensuring high quality in the architectural design. The infrastructure developed is quite comprehensive and consists of more than a hundred thousand lines of code.
Our research makes the following contributions: an advanced architectural design for developing research applications, a software platform with many built-in reusable components for medical research and consideration of non-functional requirements such as portability, reliability, maintainability to name a few, and an augmented reality module for breast tumor visualization.