Health-Tech Startup Aktivo Labs Scales Up With MongoDB Atlas

Aktivo Labs, a pioneering health-tech startup based in Singapore, has made significant strides in the fight against chronic diseases. Aktivo Labs develops innovative preventative healthcare technology solutions that encourage healthier lifestyles.

The Aktivo Score® —the flagship product of Aktivo Labs built on MongoDB Atlas—is a simple yet powerful tool designed to guide users toward healthier living.

“By collecting and analyzing data from smartphones and wearables—including physical activity, sleep patterns, and sedentary behavior—the Aktivo Score provides personalized recommendations to help users improve their health,” said Aktivo Labs CTO Jonnie Avinash at MongoDB.local Singapore in August 2024.

Aktivo Labs also works closely with insurance companies. Acting as a data processor, it helps insurers integrate some of the Aktivo Score features into their own apps to improve customer engagement.

Empowering insurers with out-of-the-box apps and user journeys

From the start, the Aktivo Labs engineering team chose to work on MongoDB Atlas because the platform’s document model and cloud nature provided the flexibility and scalability required to support the company’s business model.

The first goal of the engineering team was to enable insurance providers to integrate Aktivo Score smoothly within their own infrastructures.

The team built software development kits (SDKs) that insurers can embed in various iOS and Android apps. The SDKs enable progressive web app journeys for user experience, which insurers can then rebrand and customize as their own.

Next, the Aktivo Labs team created a web portal to help companies manage their apps and monitor their performance. This required discreet direct integrations with a myriad of wearables.

“When we started to deploy things with companies, we were able to replicate this architecture so we could support all kinds of configurations,” Avinash said. “We could give you dedicated clusters if the number of users that you’re expecting is big enough. If you’re not expecting too many customers, we could give you colocated or shared environments.”

Finding more efficiencies, flexibility, and scalability with MongoDB Atlas

“When we started off, one of our challenges was that we had a very small engineering team. A lot of the focus had to be on functionality, and the cost of tech had to be kept low,” said Avinash.

Working on MongoDB Atlas allowed the Aktivo Labs team to focus on product development rather than on database management and overhead costs.

As the company grew and expanded to markets across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, another challenge arose: Aktivo Labs needed to ensure its platform could scale and handle large volumes of disparate data efficiently.

MongoDB Atlas was the optimal solution because its fully managed multi-cloud platform could easily scale as the company grew. MongoDB Atlas also provided Aktivo Labs the flexibility it needed to handle the wide variety, volume, and complexity of data generated by users’ health metrics.

Based on insights from the MongoDB Atlas oplog, the engineering team made proactive updates to the database in real-time in anticipation of dynamic changes to leaderboards and challenges in the app. This approach enables Aktivo Labs to manage complex data flows efficiently, ensuring that users always have access to the latest metrics about their health.

MongoDB Atlas’s secondary nodes and analytics nodes provide isolated environments for intensive data processing tasks, such as calculating risk scores for diabetes and hypertension. This separation ensures that the primary user-facing applications remain responsive, even during periods of heavy data processing.

These isolated environments have also been an important factor in achieving compliance with the data-anonymization requirements from health insurers.

“The moment you start showing that it’s a managed service and you’re able to show a lot of these things, the amount of faith that both auditors and clients have in us is a lot more,” said Avinash.

Powered by MongoDB Atlas, Aktivo Labs is now looking to expand into U.S. and European markets, pursuing its mission of preventing chronic diseases on a global scale.