Tactile Medical: Creating a strategic digital experience

Tactile Medical develops at-home therapies that improve people’s lives with lymphedema, lipedema, and chronic venous insufficiency. To further enhance patients’ experience, the company sought to educate them on their chronic condition through a patient-friendly mobile application.  

Tactile Medical develops pneumatic compression devices that help patients with lymphedema, lipedema, and chronic venous insufficiency manage their symptoms. The device, roughly the size of a home printer, pumps pressurized air through hoses into a garment attached to an affected body area, thus improving lymphatic fluid movement. With only the hardware device available, though, the patient experience lacked the accessibility, efficiency, and support that a digital solution can offer end-users.

To help Tactile Medical on its digital patient journey, we created a cloud-based mobile application that connects to the medical device via Bluetooth and guides patients through treatment. It has several components: a knowledge section where users learn about different aspects of their chronic condition, an order tracker, a segment where patients track their symptoms and treatment sessions, and an option to share treatment logs with their healthcare provider.  

We developed and deployed the mobile app using Azure on both iOS and Android. The application is almost entirely back-end-driven, allowing changes to be made without a new mobile client version. UI components, texts, and even communication with the hardware device are controlled on the back-end, thus reducing the number of required updates by end-users. Тhe back-end-driven approach also relates to the choice of Contentful as a content management platform where the different resources reside and can be added, edited, and removed dynamically.

The ultimate goal of the digital solution — to effectively guide users on how to use the device to manage their symptoms — was a top priority for our design team. At the project’s onset, we had an on-site immersion session with the client to learn about their product, users, and their medical conditions and understand the company’s business objectives. From there, we developed a set of comprehensive wireframes to define the app experience for users. We then brought the entire experience to life through a new UI concept before launching into design production.

The launch of the mobile app helped Tactile Medical add a connected device to its portfolio and stay competitive in the medical device market. The positive patient response to the digital solution proves that establishing a digital connection with the patient was a strong business move for the company. Drawing on the data they collect from the app, Tactile Medical can learn about user habits and behaviors and get a further understanding of how patients use the device. Ultimately, the analysis of the gathered data allows the company to continuously make improvements to its products.