ELITE: Mental health PWA for professional athletes

About the client and their mission

ELITE Athlete Services is a Canadian mental health company with a specialized clinic to provide mental health, mental wellness, and mental performance services for professional, amateur, and retiring athletes. They offer personal counseling sessions with registered psychologists to help athletes in North America cope with stress, mental health issues, and unhealthy habits. The company aims to help athletes enhance their physical performance through holistic strategies for mental health improvement.

Business goals or why ELITE invested in the PWA development

When considering the expansion of their services with a technology offering, ELITE pursued the following business goals:

• Engage with a large athletic community
• Increase brand awareness among professional sports organizations and teams
• Deliver proactive mental health services
• Provide one-on-one counseling sessions only after the initial mental health assessment

They hoped to achieve these goals by developing a comprehensive mental health app for sports teams and individual athletes to help them assess and improve mental health.

Client’s request

ELITE needed an expert technology partner for the MVP development of a mental health app for athletes to help them:

• assess mental health with basic and additional surveys and questionnaires
• manage and track their mental health in a team and individually via survey results analysis
• improve mental performance with personalized learning materials or on-demand counseling sessions

After exploring our expertise and clients’ reviews, ELITE chose Yalantis. The client needed the mental skills training app for athletes ready in three months before sports seasons begin in major leagues to help a large number of athletes keep their mental health in check during this high-pressure and stressful period.

Solution scope

Discovery and research

Our team needed to speed up the development process and yet deliver a high-performing and quality mental training app for athletes. To start quick and efficient MVP development, we devoted the first month of collaboration to the discovery phase, which included:

• Decomposition of functional and non-functional requirements by cooperating with mental health experts and SMEs
• Value stream mapping to establish and compare as-is and expected user flow
• Analysis of the needs of different user roles: admins, practitioners, and athletes
• Design specifications to make user experience convenient and clear for athletes under frequent pressure

Development of core MVP features

Athlete-facing functionality

To create a complete self-assessment experience for athletes, the core functionality of the user-facing interface included:

• Fast and simple onboarding for individuals or team-based access
• Personalized mental health surveys that adjusts to fit the users’ needs
• Dashboard to view survey results and scores
• Content and resources for further development
• Access to expert information

Flexible survey system

One of the most complex (and most valuable) parts of this custom solution was to develop a dynamic and flexible survey. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all questionnaire, we developed a survey logic system that adapted in real time:

• Athletes go through an initial mental health screening to assess various aspects of performance.
• Initial assessment determined the needs for further screening and intervention
• No two athletes received the same experience—with each athlete getting their own info on mental performance, making the results more relevant and actionable.

ELITE also needed an opportunity to update and edit survey questions and sections in their mental wellness app for athletes. But frequent updates would make historical data (critical for calculating mental health scores for a sportsman) obsolete. To fix this, we introduced the possibility of creating different survey versions and collecting historical data for each version separately to keep the data always accurate.

Practitioner-facing functionality

To ensure practitioners can offer personalized services, the application allowed them to view:

• sports teams and organizations
• survey components and athletes’ mental health scores
• content recommended for the athletes

Admin-facing functionality

To provide athletes and practitioners with an uninterrupted, proactive, and comprehensive service delivery, core functionality for application admins included:

• user and practitioner management with full control over access levels
• management of application invites
• survey and data management with anonymized insights for analysis

Technology choices with scalability, high performance, and security at the core

During sports seasons, mental health apps for athletes have to support thousands of simultaneous users. Therefore, scalability and high performance were of the highest priority when selecting the technology stack:

• React.js for front-end development that allows for quick application loading and performance
• Python and Django for back-end to speed up development, ensure efficient integrations, and achieve high application performance
• AWS for infrastructure setup to manage an increased data load without compromising system performance and ensure up to three-second application response time

Scalable data management and processing

For the fast cloud infrastructure setup of the psychology app for athletes, our team used the DevOps serverless accelerator. This is our proprietary solution for cases when rapid scaling and cost-efficiency are critical. This solution is based on a variety of AWS services:

• AWS Fargate and ECS (Elastic Container Service) for automatic scaling
• AWS S3 and CloudFront for dynamic content delivery, ensuring quick load times no matter where the athlete is located
• AWS CloudWatch for alerts to enable proactive system monitoring and timely intervention, ensuring system reliability

Data security and compliance

For high data security and rigid identity management, our developers set up the following security measures, which also helped ensure essential HIPAA compliance for the MVP application version:

• Expiration time of app invitations is set up to one year
• Forced log out after 10 minutes of inactivity in the application
• AWS CloudFront with WAF and AWS Shield safeguards the system from DDoS attacks and ensures security at the access layer
• AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with private subnets ensures that no external connection can directly access critical infrastructure
• AWS Secrets Manager for centralized storage and management of credentials and API keys
• AWS Cognito for user identity verification and management

Value delivered

Our three-month collaboration on the athlete mental health app development yielded the following results and benefits:

• MVP version of the mobile-first PWA with core functionality for athletes, practitioners, and admins delivered on time for the sports seasons
• Data management and processing infrastructure ready for high load during peak periods
• Flexible and scalable AWS architecture that provides a solid foundation for continuous development iterations
• Thorough documentation of all business analytics and development processes with detailed admin manuals to simplify further work on the project

Even after launch, we stay in contact with ELITE for ongoing application support.

Future plans

• AI implementation for mental performance predictions, personalized learning suggestions, and deep-dive survey results analysis
• SaaS-based development to expand platform offering to other industries