Spezi Architecture

Stanford Spezi is built upon a scalable and extensible architecture tailored to digital health solutions consisting of independent modules that are assembled into fully-functional applications and interact with each other via a shared Standard.

The Standard component serves as the central shared repository, which handles the encoding and mapping of the health data used in the mobile application. It also store and manage the device’s health data per data privacy and security guidelines. A shared configuration maintained and distributed by the Standard allows components to dynamically adapt to the shared settings of the digital health application instance. Different Local Storage Providers can act as components handling encryption, logging, and security rules, safeguarding data on the device while also securely delivering data to cloud storage providers.

Data Sources and Data Source User Interface components provide input to the Standard. The main responsibility of these components is to collect and process incoming data from patients, sensors, and connected devices. Data Sources can provide configuration interfaces that allow digital health developers to adjust the modality of the data collection as well as an adapter to map data to the shared data Standard. These data sources can also include user interface-driven interactions, such as survey components, exercises, or the passive collection of data. Onboarding user interfaces collecting essential demographic information, gaining consent, and letting the user customize the data collection, storage, interpretation, and sharing are essential instantiations of Data Source User Interfaces.

Research Application User Interfaces display the collected data and shared state in the digital health applications, allowing developers to build insightful user interfaces and provide additional context. This can be especially important in research studies, allowing users to obtain contact information, background information about the study, and insights into the value added by participating in a study. Other common Research Application User Interfaces include the display of patient data, an overview of open and closed tasks, and periodic reminders about schedules and repeating tasks. The Data Storage Provider components serve as an external synchronization and communication component for the standards-based digital health architecture. Consensual data collection in cloud storage systems and the connection to EHR systems is essential to most research and patient-facing digital health applications. Abstracting these synchronization mechanisms (additions, updates, and removals) from the primary data Standard allows a modular approach to connecting digital health applications to different cloud storage providers. Standards most often provide an encodable representation of the data stored and allow data storage providers to encode and package data obtained from the application.