A Lightweight App Distribution Strategy to Generate Interest in Complex Commercial Apps: Case Study of an Automated Wound Measurement System

Tablet-based healthcare technologies automating clinical triage procedures hold exciting promise for increased precision and expediency. These point-of-care (POC) solutions are often complex, and their introduction to the marketplace may encounter cost and usability barriers. One example triage procedure is wound measurement. This paper demonstrates an innovative approach to POC wound measurement by introducing a free “light” version of a wound measurement mobile app that serves as a teaser for a full-featured commercial offering. We first describe the commercial offering; a 3D wound assessment tablet application. Then we present the smartphone app that inherits features from the tablet app. The smartphone app adopts a simple scaling algorithm to address the lack of a highly advanced computer vision system for the automated wound measurement task that exists in the tablet app. This paper describes the design process for developing this smartphone app, provides a detailed exposition of the scaling algorithm, and discusses the significance of this approach to app development and distribution