Stanford Medicine mHealth platform

A powerful, and capable HIPAA-compliant platform for mobile studies

The mHealth Platform is a set of HIPAA-compliant services operated and maintained by Research IT to provide a secure place for mobile applications to store data and perform tasks that cannot be accomplished directly on a device.

Two different architectures are supported. The original platform supports BridgeSDK based client mobile apps and a newer platform supports Firebase SDK based apps.

The first version of the mHealth Platform (v1) provides services for mobile applications to handle participant sign up, email verification, consent, and participation status. It also provides services for getting sensor and participant data off the device and into our environment. Data can be accessed via dashboards or downloaded via researcher APIs. The mHealth Platform has been used in support of large-scale population health studies such as MyHeartCounts, and targeted research studies such as STREAM (Studying TRiggers in Everyday Activity for Migraine).

The next generation of the mHealth Platform (v2),  adds support for Google's Firestore database via the Firebase SDK, and related services such as identity management.  

Co-created with our community

Research IT has collaborated with the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign to ensure the new Open Source mobile development framework CardinalKit is pre-integrated with the mHealth v2 Platform to make it easier, faster, and cheaper than ever to build new mobile applications for research.

May 2020: mHealth v2 launched

The next generation of the mHealth Platform, adds support for Google's Firestore database via the Firebase SDK, and related services such as identity management. Research IT is collaborating with the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign to ensure the new Open Source mobile development framework CardinalKit is pre-integrated with the mHealth Platform to make it easier, faster, and cheaper than ever to build new mobile applications for research.

May 2019: mHealth Platform migrated to Cloud

In collaboration with our partners, Biarca, Research IT migrated the mHealth platform to Google Cloud. The reason for the migration was to put the platform on a stronger foundation for rapid ideation, and testing and therefore, a faster  development cycle. As part of the migration, we also migrated an active study, Stream,  on mHealth platform.