Poppy is the world’s only pathogen sensing and detection network that helps protect the places where we work, live, and visit by monitoring both air and surfaces for the COVID-19 virus and more than 1000 other pathogens. We set out to help the Poppy team improve the way they do their magic behind the scenes in order to keep workplaces safe, including simplifying the collection process performed by their field specialists.

After partnering with Poppy, our first mission was to create a mobile application that streamlined the sample collection and reporting process for the field specialists working with the Poppy team.

The app consists of a home screen where specialists can see a high-level overview of recent samples that have been collected - so they know where to go next - and an in-app form where they can submit important data tied to each sample. This includes options to scan the barcodes and QR codes on each sample for IDs, so the specialists no longer need to type them in by hand.

Our top priority was making sure that the app UX was as simple and straightforward as possible so as not to slow down the specialists. We wanted this tool to fit seamlessly into their workflow, and optimize the way they report findings

Our development team set to work, and did a fantastic job, not only producing fluid, functional applications, but also bringing our design team’s work to life in pixel perfect style. Our developers certainly faced a few challenges, like decoding sample barcodes accurately with the scanner tool in the Field Specialists App. After learning how the scanning environment or a phone’s camera quality affects the decoding process, the team created an ideal scanner configuration using Quagga2 (an extension of xzing library) which they discovered offered us the best solution for this application. Designing effective data models also proved to be a hurdle, however, with the help of an aggregation pipeline, our team was able to brainstorm a simple, efficient, and flexible data model that could readily scale in the future.

To achieve synchronicity between the Field Specialist App, the LAMP Dashboard, and the outgoing email service to customers, our development team worked with two databases. It is vital that we ensure any data created, updated, or deleted is accurately and efficiently dispatched across both databases, and our developers achieved this by creating asynchronous logic that tries to write to both databases. If a write action fails, the entire written process will be reverted.