Urtica
Code scanning | Healthcare
AR/VR technology
January - March 2024
Key takeaways
Problem
Drug distributors are obliged to monitor the products that come to them. Every drug packaging must be scanned separately. Previous solutions enabled scanning only one product at a time, which significantly enlogated this process. Moreover, some codes are small and, thus, hard to read from afar.
Solution
Android mobile app
Thanks to the Urtica app, you can quickly scan many drug codes at once–even 50 per second. It significantly speeds up the process of monitoring products.
The app also shows what drugs have already been scanned, facilitates detecting codes, and sends information from codes to the ERP system.
Process step by step
Market and client's needs analysis
Solution testing
App development and QA tests
App distribution
Our tasks
Android app development
Integration with internal infrastructure
QA tests
Implementation of AR/VR solutions
About Urtica
Urtica is the leading drug distributor for inpatient care in the Polish market and one of the biggest pharmaceutical warehouses. It delivers medications and medical solutions to all Polish hospitals, many pharmacies and other healthcare providers. It supports patients by giving them access to life-saving drugs.
Client’s website: Urtica.pl
Holdapp delivered the mobile app on time while successfully fixing all reported issues. Moreover, their communication response time was impressive. The team was customer-focused, efficient, and helpful.
Goals
- Accelerating and improving the process of scanning a large amount of drug codes.
- Facilitating scanning of poorly legible codes.
- Enabling quick verification of already scanned drugs.
- Enabling sending information from codes to the ERP system’s base.
Image by Freepik
Challenges
- Preprocessing the images from mobile devices’ cameras was necessary to optimize available solutions for scanning codes.
- Due to legal constraints, we couldn’t access physical drug packages, so we had to create mockups.
- Close cooperation with a client was necessary at every stage of the software development process.
- Integration with internal systems, which are not publicly available, was impossible, so we created our own API mockups that simulated software for monitoring drugs.
Process
Kickoff meeting and preparations
We started by collecting information about the client’s requirements, goals, and needs. This allowed us to better understand the specifics of the drug monitoring process and the challenges that people scanning codes face.
Then, we analyzed similar solutions available in the market.
The next step was preparing prototypes and testing different technologies. Finally, we selected those with the greatest potential.
This way, we were able to start building the Android app.
App development and QA testing
- Native technology—the app was supposed to work solely on Android devices, so we decided to develop software with Kotlin. Native solutions ensure fast performance and optimization of the scanning process was a priority.
- QA tests—all changes in code were verified by the QA tester, who ensured the app worked flawlessly.
- ML Kit—an interface that enables the scanning of barcodes. It recognizes data in formats such as QR codes or Data Matrix and parses and structures it. ML Kit swiftly processes even low-fidelity images, which was essential for us and convinced us to choose this particular algorithm. It didn’t fully meet our needs, though, because scanning still wasn’t fast enough. That’s why we’ve adjusted it and implemented changes that enable scanning of up to 50 codes simultaneously and not 10, as Google states on its website.
We wanted to build a solution that would significantly speed up the scanning of a large number of medicines. For this reason, we used Google’s ML Kit algorithm and adjusted it to better meet our needs.
Technologies and tools
App
- Jetpack Compose
- ML Kit
Prototypes
- ARKit
- OpenGL
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Mobile Trends Awards 2021
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