Corporate Wellness Mobile App Development: From Idea to Implementation

The attention to health and well-being culture nowadays is immense. Health and wellness apps are becoming increasingly popular, even among employers who aim to provide their employees with tools to maintain good well-being. Such apps can help manage stress, support a healthy lifestyle, and increase productivity.

More and more large companies are developing a wellness app to incorporate into their corporate culture to assist their employees. This industry is growing and developing, as confirmed by Statista's research: in 2022, the global market volume for corporate health apps was $70.2 billion, and by 2032, this figure is projected to reach $146.6 billion.

Therefore, in this article, we want to share with you all the necessary information about corporate wellness and fitness app development services. We will discuss key aspects such as the advantages of using such an app, developing attractive features, ensuring privacy and security, as well as effectively integrating the app into everyday work processes.

So, let's get started!

🤓 What Problems Are Solved by Corporate Wellness Apps?

Corporate wellness programs are digital applications that help support the health and well-being of employees. Let's take a closer look at what organizational issues they solve:

Improve Employee Health

These programs are designed to promote a culture of healthy living among the workforce. They include features to support both physical health (tracking activity and sleep, developing personalized workout plans, nutrition recommendations) and mental health (memory, attention, thinking exercises, breathing practices, stress management methods, emotional background control).

Many corporate wellness apps also offer guides and yoga sessions. Such activities help maintain both physical fitness and mental well-being. By the way, if you're interested, Stormotion also offers yoga app development services.

Enhance Overall Job Satisfaction

Professional burnout is a current problem. Implementing a healthcare system demonstrates the company's interest in supporting the well-being of its employees. Thus, it improves the morale of workers, creating a positive atmosphere within the team. Implementing a wellness culture enhances a sense of community among colleagues and overall job satisfaction.

🤌 The Best Corporate Wellness Challenge Apps for Large Companies

Large companies face unique challenges when it comes to employee health and wellness, including diverse needs and managing scale. The right corporate fitness app can play a crucial role in engaging employees, promoting health, and fostering a culture of well-being across vast and varied workforces. Here are some of the top corporate health apps that stand out for their effectiveness and scalability:

Limeade

Limeade offers individual employee wellness programs aimed at increasing their engagement at work and improving their overall health. The health app for companies is designed to support the work environment with comprehensive tools and activities that promote well-being and meaningful employee engagement.

Currently, Limeade is used by millions of users in more than 100 countries.

Virgin Pulse

The Virgin Pulse mobile app is one of many initiatives aimed at improving the health and well-being of people participating in employer-based health schemes. The app promotes daily engagement and the development of long-lasting habits such as walking and other physical activities.

Currently, the company serves around 14 million users.

Wellness360

Wellness360 is a platform for employee wellness designed to provide comprehensive tools and resources to improve the health and well-being of employees. The platform offers a variety of features such as activity tracking, workouts, and real-time analytics to help users maintain and improve their health.

The application has been on the market for over 10 years and currently serves more than 100 companies.

Vantage Fit

Vantage Fit is another global employee wellness program that focuses not only on psychological support but also on physical activity. Its main advantages include features such as a step tracker, initiatives to maintain emotional well-being, team activities, and progress analytics.

An important feature is that Vantage Fit can synchronize with wearable tech such as FitBit, GoogleFit, AppleHealth, Garmin, and others.

Mindance

Mindance is an application for maintaining mental health, primarily designed for corporate wellness programs. Its goal is to support the mental health of employees by providing them with a range of tools and resources, including meditation and individual programs.

Stormotion had the fortunate opportunity to develop this application. Keep reading to learn more about our experience!

💰 Is it Profitable to Develop a Corporate Health and Fitness Application?

Well, having familiarized ourselves with the main problems that the implementation of a corporate application can solve for employees and learned about popular applications on the market, it's time to talk about the benefits. Developing any application is always associated with risks and many other factors that can either improve your business or add problems.

In this section, we will talk about the two main advantages of developing and implementing a health app for a company.

Economic Benefit

It may seem strange that the cost of using a corporate application can help your company save money. Let's take a closer look at what we mean:

• Reducing healthcare costs.

Corporate health applications are primarily aimed at maintaining the health of your employees. This includes tracking, advice, useful information about physical activity, as well as attention to emotional well-being and the psychological health of your employees.

Implementing a corporate health application can significantly reduce your healthcare costs by reducing the incidence of employee illness, burnout, nervous breakdowns, and so on.

• Improving company performance.

Healthy employees are productive employees. Applications that encourage regular physical exercise and strengthen mental health can reduce absenteeism and presenteeism (i.e., being at work but sick, leading to reduced productivity). Increased labor productivity leads to increased company revenue. The cost to create a fitness app, namely a corporate wellness app, is a worthwhile investment considering these significant benefits.

• Partnerships and sponsorships.

Additional revenue can come from partnerships with insurance companies, fitness equipment manufacturers, dietary brands, or local gyms. These partners could sponsor parts of the application or offer discounts to users, which would be mutually beneficial.

• Advertising.

Selective advertising from health-oriented advertisers is less common in the corporate environment due to confidentiality considerations, but it can be another source of revenue, especially in applications used in a broader consumer market.

🤳 Features You Have to Add to Your Corporate Wellness App

A successful corporate fitness app should include features that attract users, provide tangible benefits, and support overall employee health and well-being.

We have prepared the key features to focus on when developing a corporate health apps:

Easy Sign-Up

Make the registration process simple and accessible. Minimize the number of steps required to create an account and provide several registration options, such as email, phone number, or company ID.

📱 Corporate Wellness App Development: Step-by-Step Guide

How to develop a mobile app for corporate wellness? Where to start? What to pay attention to in order to ultimately meet all user needs, be profitable, and competitive?

Let's consider all the strategic and technical steps you need to take:

Market Research and Idea Validation

Before diving into corporate wellness application development, conduct thorough market research to identify the needs and preferences of your target audience:

• Analyze competitor apps. What advantages do they have? What unique features do they provide to customers? And what can you provide?
• Research market trends in corporate health applications. Highlight fitness app ideas and the main trends in modern approaches and technologies.

You can also conduct surveys of potential users or create a focus group. This will help you ensure the needs of potential customers for your application and focus on developing only useful features for your application.

Define App Features and Functionalities

After the market research is done, you probably already have a rough idea of the features and capabilities of your future application.

Consider the possibility of including activity tracking, health indicators (heart rate, sleep cycles, etc.), personalized wellness plans, mental health resources, gamification elements, and social functions to increase engagement.

💡 Follow our medical app development services to learn more about the features we can help you implement in your corporate wellness app!

Use analytical tools to track the effectiveness of the application in terms of user engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Regularly collect user feedback to understand what works and what doesn't, and identify opportunities for further improvement.

Regularly update the application, fixing errors, improving functionality, and adding new features based on user needs and technological advancements.

📲 Integration With Other Devices

Not only is integrating existing HR databases/HRM systems and other related tools with corporate fitness challenge apps entirely possible, but it can also offer a great amount of improvement opportunities and benefits to both employers and employees.

It allows to make employee onboarding processes significantly smoother and provide scalability and flexibility bу ensuring that new hires have access to wellness content/resources without much time consumption and effort.

By seamlessly syncing with HR data, applications can also provide personalized health insights/content/programs/recommendations that are individually tailored and adjusted according to employee’s job role, age or gender without the need of making the employee fill in all their data manually.

🔐 Addressing Privacy and Security in Corporate Wellness Apps

The rise of corporate wellness applications presents both opportunities for enhancing employee well-being and challenges in preserving data privacy. Recent discussions have spotlighted the vulnerabilities of these apps, which often serve as potential gateways to exposure of employee data to potential breaches/leaks.

It's crucial to remember that employee data used by wellness applications can be very personal, therefore regulations should exist to ensure it stays private.

Here are some measures that should be implemented to enhance the security of apps for corporate fitness programs:

Secure Authentication/Authorization

Secure authentication and authorization are vital for protecting employee data from various security threats. Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) stands out as one of the most effective defenses against password-related attacks. Utilizing authentication protocols that eliminate the need for passwords adds an extra layer of security to an application.

Despite challenges, transitioning towards passwordless authentication methods is essential to minimize threats associated with password-based authentication.

When it comes to storing passwords, one approach to store them more securely is to hash them using one-way mathematical functions to transform the password into a different form. Unlike encryption, where the password can be reversed to its original form, the hashing process can not be reverted.
While transitioning to passwordless solutions is ideal, enhancing password-based authentication mechanisms remains crucial to improve app security.

One way to achieve this is by implementing password rules, such as requiring a minimum length,a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters, to create stronger passwords. Alongside this, implementing rate limiters can be effective in preventing brute-force attacks. Rate limiters work by counting failed authentication attempts and blocking users for a certain period after reaching a predefined threshold. This prevents attackers from repeatedly guessing passwords until they succeed.

Another important (but a lot of the times forgotten) point is showing a uniform failure message instead of distinguishing between invalid username/incorrect password messages to make life harder for potential attackers :)

Access Control

In the context of digital health apps, access control is crucial for maintaining the much needed privacy of sensitive health-related data.

Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensures that only authorized users can access and manage API resources and operations based on their assigned roles and permissions. By defining access control, access to specific features or data can be restricted, preventing unauthorized personnel or users from accessing confidential info.

Misconfigurations in access control could result in users gaining access to privileged areas of the app, posing risks to data confidentiality and integrity. Therefore, it's crucial to carefully manage access levels, ensuring the security and privacy of employee wellness data.

Data Encryption/Secure Storage

Strong encryption mechanisms should be implemented for both transmission and storage of data since data encryption remains one of the most critical tools for preventing database leaks. When encrypted, stolen data becomes less usable to attackers. Various tools are available to facilitate database security.

Despite having some drawbacks, such as performance impacts or maintenance challenges, this approach can significantly enhance data security and confidentiality within corporate wellness applications.

Security Testing and Monitoring

Ensuring the security of backend APIs requires continuous testing and monitoring. Security testing aims to validate the software's resistance to malicious attacks, unauthorized access, and data breaches. Regular audits and testing uncover vulnerabilities that may have been missed during development or previous testing rounds.

Real-time monitoring enables the timely detection of unusual patterns, suspicious activities, or potential security breaches, empowering software teams to take swift action against emerging threats.

Auditing Package Dependencies for Security Vulnerabilities

Many apps rely on third-party libraries or dependencies to add features quickly without building them from scratch. However, using these libraries can also bring security risks.

When you include a dependency in your project, you're also bringing in any security issues it might have. For example, if a library used to handle authentication has a vulnerability, your whole app could be at risk of data theft. To address this, it's essential to regularly review these tools for potential issues and update them as necessary.

Additionally, it's crucial to be mindful of outdated tools that may no longer receive updates or support. By implementing this process, organizations can ensure the security and integrity of their applications while maintaining efficient corporate wellness app development practices.

👤 Overcoming Challenges in User Adoption and Sustained Engagement

The main problems your company may face when implementing a corporate fitness competition app are user adaptation and sustainable interaction. First and foremost, you need to familiarize your employees with the new innovation and explain the benefits of using such an app. Something new often causes fear, so we'll tell you about several effective strategies for adapting the app for employees.

Effective Strategies for Marketing the App to Employees

How to tell employees about the innovation without repelling them? We suggest considering several options:

• Launch an internal marketing campaign that emphasizes the benefits of the app through email, presentations during conference calls, and so on. Use feedback and thematic studies to demonstrate its effectiveness.
• Lead by example. If you are a leader or HR manager in the company, use the app and talk about its benefits.
• Introduce the app at a corporate event. You can create a separate event to present the new app or simply dedicate attention to it during other general corporate events.

Strategies for Keeping Employees Engaged with the Corporate Wellness App

After successfully introducing employees to the innovation in their work life, the next step is to constantly maintain interest. In addition to the vast amount of useful content available in the corporate health app, there are several other important points to consider when choosing or creating a corporate health app:

-Gamification in the app. Ensure that the app includes various trials, competitions (e.g., Competitions can be based on step count, series of meditations, or completed health courses).

• Rewards for achievements. Use an achievement and badge system for health metrics and consistency in app use. These rewards can be displayed in user profiles and shared with the app user community.

⚙️ Tech Stack for Building a Corporate Wellness App

Here are some tech tips from our developer Natalya Yandola on how to build a fitness application that serves corporate wellness needs:

• React Native - widely used and trusted by both tech giants and small businesses, React Native offers cross-platform compatibility, cost-effectiveness and rapid development without compromising slick and highly responsive user interface.

• NestJS - a framework for building efficient, scalable and secure Node.js server-side applications which provides developers with a powerful set of tools to write clean and concise code. Coming with a range of built-in features, NestJS simplifies the process of defining and enforcing data validation rules and provides various mechanisms for encrypting sensitive information and preventing common security vulnerabilities.

• Keycloak - an open source software product to allow single sign-on with identity and access management aimed at modern applications and services. Keycloak allows developers to add authentication to applications and secure services with minimum effort. As stated in Keycloak’s security policy, the Keycloak team takes security very seriously to make their software reliable and trustworthy.

• gRPC - a modern open source framework that can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking and authentication. It was designed specifically to allow developers to create high-performance APIs for microservice architectures across distributed data centers.

🙋‍♂️ How Stormotion Can Help in the Development of a Corporate Fitness Application?

As a company specializing in the development of applications in the fitness, wellness, and IoT sectors, we at Stormotion have a solid portfolio that includes a prime example of a corporate wellness app - Mindance. Here, we'd like to share a bit about our work on this application.

Founded in 2017, Mindance started as a startup and, since 2021, has been part of the prestigious and experienced PME Familienservice Group, which employs over 2000 staff members.

Our development team primarily focused on the mobile application, starting from scratch. We implemented testing protocols, automated deployment processes, and managed the publishing of the applications. In addition to these tasks, we also:

• Transitioned the entire legacy and user base from the company's previous two projects, which now serve as the foundation for the new and improved application.
• Developed a web version of the application using react-native-web.
• Created an admin panel equipped with new tools: a news tool (to allow subscribing companies to share internal news) and an event tool (to enable these companies to plan their internal events).
• Developed new features for the application.

Overall, at Stormotion, we are prepared to offer you a full range of services for application development or to meet your specific needs. Our team is comprised of talented experts in various fields who are ready to assist you in creating the best possible application for corporate health.

👂 Takeaways

As you may already understand, the field of corporate health applications is quite promising nowadays. And most importantly, it is useful for employees and maintaining a healthy atmosphere in the company.

But no matter how beautiful the advantages may sound, we want to summarize some difficulties that you may encounter during the development or implementation of a corporate health application:

• Plan all the features of the application in advance, conduct a survey among a focus group to understand what is useful and what is not needed at all.
• Pay special attention to the security of your employees' data, following the legislation of your country.
• Develop a quality strategy for introducing the application to your employees.
• Constantly update the application, adding diverse and dynamic content. Only in this way will you be able to maintain user interest.
• Don't forget about gamification, it can really work very well.

So, if you have any questions about a corporate health application or if you have new ideas, we will be happy to help you! Write to us, and we will arrange a call with you soon!