From classroom prototype to clinical research

The Situation

Stanford's CS 342 - Building for Digital Health course brings together Stanford Computer Science and Stanford Medicine to turn clinical ideas into working digital-health products.

For one of these projects, Stanford's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences was developing Balance, an application led by Dr. James Lock to support adolescents with eating disorders. The goal was to help participants manage distress and emotional regulation during difficult moments such as mealtimes, while also giving the research team better visibility into their experience.

Students had already created an initial prototype using Stanford's Spezi framework, but moving from a course project to software that could be used by real participants in a clinical research setting required a different level of engineering, reliability, integration, and product maturity.

The Solution

We took the student-built prototype and evolved it into a native iOS digital-health application suitable for use by real study participants and Stanford researchers.

Balance gives adolescents access to a range of in-the-moment coping tools, including guided meditation and breathing exercises, visual activities, games, drawing, and simple ways to record how they are feeling.

We also developed a companion Apple Watch experience that captures biometric signals such as heart rate and connects that data with the participant's interactions in the app. This allowed the research team to combine self-reported emotional state with physiological information and monitor participant activity remotely.

The result was a research-ready digital-health platform that brought behavioral interventions, participant-reported outcomes, wearable biometrics, and Stanford's backend infrastructure together in a single experience.