EDO Ophtha is a partnership between a group of corneal tissue processors (through donors) and a medical device company. When a person passes away and donates their corneal tissues (eyes), their tissues are processed into allografts that surgeons use for corneal transplantation. EDO Ophtha provides the intermediary service of order management and administration. They help patients needing corneal surgeries to match with the available resources offered by the tissue processors.

The history of the organization dates back to the 1950s. Since then, they have come a long way and have been recognized as one of the leading bodies specialized in processing and providing

eye donation facilities under the supervision of highly recognized ophthalmologists, surgeons, and experts.

Client Requirement

Our clients are in the business of matching donated human cornea tissues with surgery requirements. Their suppliers process cornea tissues received from donors and create allografts (grafts) from them based on "priority demand."

The requirement consisted of several key features. These include managing and viewing priority order information from their servers, maintaining a decision matrix, offline data management, a basic image editing tool, handling and capturing donors' data, and keeping track of the donor details of the tissues they process.

The mobile application was meant to be utilized by the tissue processors inside a cleanroom allograft production session. The intent was to give the processors an idea about the current demand for certain allograft types and to provide a mechanism to take and upload photos of the allografts and perform a few basic edits on them(markup/labeling). Subsequently, these can be provided to the surgeons along with their comments and notes.

The application needs to be used by the processor's work while wearing gloves inside the cleanrooms. This reduces the sensitivity of the touch screen, and hence large components were required at the UI of the application. Introducing a modern solution did not discourage them from continuing the process; and instead, they were keen on the simplicity and the utilizability of the application.

Challenges

In this project, fetching data from their servers was required to re-create the priority orders in our system. We also needed to ensure that every order was listed in the app and the CMS. Data submitted by the suppliers required to be presented back to their servers according to the formats used by the EDO Ophtha management. We put some extra effort here and conducted research to understand the structure.

Additionally, the cleanrooms they were working in were mainly underground labs. Lack of network connectivity was a general and unavoidable situation here. Hence, we had to include a mechanism to store. Here, we needed the new entries of the app to upload by itself whenever they reconnect after a connection loss. Managing the offline content was challenging up to a certain extent due to the nature of the data we dealt with. We had to implement an application-level sync status monitoring mechanism to achieve this functionality without conflicting operations.

Solution and Final outcome

Our team was able to deliver a complete solution (iOS app and the CMS) to EDO Ophtha management while overcoming all the challenging situations. We also managed to adhere to all initial and later requirements. The cutting-edge technologies and tools we used enabled them to carry out their routine operations smoothly. Our clients were extremely satisfied with the end-user experience, especially the smooth functionality of the iOS app. Despite all the complexities we had to deal with the requirements, we managed to complete the initial development work within six man-months. Since then, we have been working with them on the changes and improvements to the project to date.