Vision training & eye-tracking app for clinical therapy
A custom mobile app delivering practitioner-managed visual exercises with high-performance animations and real clinical workflows — for a vision therapy clinic scaling beyond the office.
Challenge
Our client — a vision therapy clinic working alongside a chiropractic partner — needed a mobile application capable of delivering vision therapy exercises both in-clinic and at home. These aren't simple UI animations. They're time-sensitive, highly interactive visual stimuli used for tracking, fixation, and pursuit training — and the rendering has to be smooth and precise, or the therapy doesn't work.
The core complexities included:
- Building real-time animated visuals powered by Skia that perform consistently across mobile devices
- Deep exercise configurability — direction, speed, visual cues, timing — without overwhelming the patient-facing interface
- Serving two fundamentally different audiences: practitioners who design and assign therapy programs, and patients who execute them
- Architecting a foundation that could grow from a standalone app into a full therapy delivery platform
Solution
We partnered with the client to design and build a flexible, scalable system — starting with a rich interactive exercise library, then evolving it into a role-based therapy platform with real practitioner workflows.
Practitioner Experience
- Create and configure visual exercise presets with full control over parameters — movement direction, target type, dot size, speed, repetitions, and timing
- Group exercises into program sequences and assign therapy routines to individual patients
- Modify and iterate therapy parameters over time as treatment evolves
- Manage multiple patients under a single practitioner account with role-based access
Exercise Engine & Patient Experience
- Patients receive guided programs from one or more providers and see assigned exercises with intuitive visual cues
- Each training session delivers smooth, responsive animated feedback powered by Skia — a cross-platform rendering engine that ensures clinical-grade precision on any device
- Exercises include Pursuits (smooth tracking), Saccades (rapid gaze shifts), and configurable variants — all rendering at consistent frame rates regardless of parameter complexity
Architecture Evolution
- Began as a standalone local app with hardcoded logic — the right call for validating the core exercise experience before adding infrastructure
- Transitioned to a cloud-based service architecture with user accounts, roles, and backend APIs for assignments and data sync
- Centralized exercise definitions and presets with scalable deployment pipelines
- Planned the transition from day one, so the move from local to cloud was an evolution — not a rebuild
Impact
This work gave the client a production-ready tool for delivering precise visual therapy outside the clinic. Practitioners can tailor programs to individual needs and manage them remotely. Patients engage consistently with assigned routines without losing clinical fidelity.
And the architecture is built for what comes next — notifications, clinician dashboards, analytics, and broader adoption — on a foundation that another team could pick up and extend without starting over.
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