Customized Healthcare Zoom Application

Our partner is a clinic that helps people work on their diet, weight, and overall wellness. With the global pandemic, they could no longer hold their meetings in person. In addition, due to the increase of people working from home without the ability to exercise for their clinics, it was crucial to find a way to provide this service online.

customized zoom app

Challenge

Our customer decided they needed to create an app to run on the Zoom meeting service to make it easier for their members to participate. This new app would show recommendations to the users regarding meals, snacks, exercise, and things they could be doing while attending either personal or work meetings.


Solution

To address this challenge, we created a web app that runs on the Zoom platform. It appears on the right side of the screen after the member logs in with their credentials. Our client needed to be able to modify the information that appeared in the application as needed. The goal was to create an easy-to-use app that could personalize the content depending on how it was accessed.


Challenges

  • When this project started, Zoom was still developing the Zoom Platform and finalizing the standards for the Zoom App marketplace.
  • Due to the early stages of the Zoom App Marketplace standards, documentation had not yet been released, resulting in the discovery of new issues and app limitations.
  • The software development kit (SDK) for Zoom apps was still under development creating additional work for our team.
  • To address the business requirement that the content be easily modified, the team had to introduce an easy to use content management system (CMS)

Our Approach

Tackling this challenge required we leverage a number of JavaScript applications and libraries, including Strapi, Next.js, and Redis.

  • Strapi: Our selection for the CMS was a headless CMS called Strapi. It is an easy-to-use and setup open-source content management system. Strapi offers easy record creation to support all the record types that we identified across the application. Additionally, there are plugins available to fulfill other requirements such as having an HTML-based text editor.
  • Next.js: For the JavaScript application itself we used Next.js. It is a lightweight framework very similar to React. We used Next.js as it solves the routing challenges quite easily. Having a server-side rendering was a nice-to-have improvement since we were uncertain about the performance restrictions of Zoom Apps.
  • Redis: We used Redis because we knew that we needed to handle a session when connecting our Next.js app within Strapi and all other APIs that we could be hitting. Redis was a good fit to store this information and support future app improvements.

Last but not least, we had to work with Zoom SDK to be able to deploy the application into this new client and have it up and running on Zoom. To access it through Zoom, you click on the new section called Apps and there you are able to run the application. The app also has some reminders that you can set while being on a Zoom meeting such as “taking time to move around”.

The application gives snack recommendations, water tracking, food recipe recommendations, and exercises the user can do while on a meeting. The exercises are shown with animations developed by the Oktana design team.


Results

The most difficult part of the project was working with a new team that was outside of the original scope, the Zoom development team. However, we were able to attend all their meetings and discovered all the needed functionality within the development process.

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