IoT and AI in Cancer Treatment

Cancer has become the dark reality of the contemporary world with an estimate of  1,688,780 new cancer cases and 600,920 cancer deaths in the United States in this year as stated in The American Cancer Society’s 2017 annual Cancer Facts and Figures report

With the quantum involved, curing cancer is a pertinent issue that has never gone off the desk of Healthcare practitioners or technology innovators. As of now, precision medicine is the highest level of aid that has been brought by the technology innovators for curing cancer besides advanced healthcare equipment.

Precision medicine is a form of medicine which uses information about the patient’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer.

The Internet of Things (IoT) also has the potential to bring a huge transformation to the Healthcare industry. For the starters, it promises to reduce the emergency room wait time, track patient data accurately, and manage healthcare inventory.

All these functions will improve the efficiency of the healthcare sector to an unimaginable extent.

Artificial intelligence also holds a fair share in the future of technology in the healthcare sector. It is predicted that in future AI could assist doctors with cancer research, detection, and care.

Opportunities in Diagnosis and Treatment

The combined forces of AI and IoT can help to cure cancer and save a considerable number of lives each year. Currently,  AI and IoT are not functioning together in the cancer treatment space.

IoT has brought revolutionary change in the healthcare ecosystem with its potential to aid with early detection of breast cancer: ‘iTBra’.

The term is coined by the inventor of the connected bra – Rob Royea, CEO of Cyrcadia Health. In the era of wearable technology, this connected bra has revolutionary embedded temperature sensors which track changes in the temperature of breast tissue over time.

This device uses machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze the collected data and classify abnormal patterns that could indicate early stage breast cancer. Women only require to wear it once a month for 2-12 hours while they carry on with their daily chores. No radiation or prodding involved. The iTBra can be worn beneath any normal bra and the results of the test will be transmitted to a smartphone.

This device is a remarkable innovation and is far better than the traditional mammography which tends to detect the presence of cancer at usually at Stage 3 or 4. Also, the mammography produces a high number of both false-negative and false-positive results which makes it highly unreliable.

This test is primitive and misses the presence of cancer in women with dense breast tissue more than 50% of the time.  This false negative rate is reduced to 17.3% by the iTBra for all the tissue types.

Apart from the breast cancer, a variety of early-stage cancer symptoms are vague and unrecognizable in other kinds of cancer. Clearly, the rate at which cancer goes undetected is very high. If the IoT systems work in tandem with the AI technology there will be a great jump in deciphering cancer systems and the patients will receive treatment before it’s too late.

The intervention of AI is very important in the detection of cancers like mesothelioma which goes undetected in preliminary stages. Mesothelioma develops over a period of decades and is challenging to detect because early symptoms may manifest as a cough or discomfort in the chest or abdomen.

With the help of AI, such trivial symptoms can be tracked over decades and the patients will be able to receive timely treatment. The patient’s journey can be made less painful and the life expectancy can be lengthened. While IoT can be used to generate sensor-driven data and insight, AI could be put to work with the metrics and predictions in safe drug delivery.

How AI and IoT can improve Cancer Treatment

The advent of latest technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, and IoT has brought hope in the healthcare sector for better treatment ways.

The first step is already taken when the consumer technology companies have started creating wearable technology that can help detect and diagnose cancer.

Also, governing authorities all over the world have taken initiatives at varying scales to support the flourishing technologies. Government-supported programs like the “Cancer Moonshot Initiative” is the best example of government initiatives towards finding a better cure for Cancer.

With financial aid available, researchers are working on developing new treatments collaboratively.

The National Cancer Institute has launched the Cancer Moonshot program which has brought together a big faction of doctors, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and others. This program is expected to bring positive results and accelerate the cancer research by 2020.

Conclusion

MarketResearch.com says that the healthcare Internet of Things market is predicted to hit $117 billion by 2020. In the same year, the combined IoT market will hit much more than $117 billion. By 2025, the same figure is expected to jump to $2.5 trillion for Healthcare industry, followed closely by the manufacturing industry at $2.3 trillion, says Intel.

These are some promising figures which are showing the bright future of the Healthcare industry. The fusion of AI and IoT technologies would empower patients and healthcare professionals more than we have imagined.

Thus, with the aid in metrics and predictions, AI will help doctors to make better data-driven decisions and IoT will provide the necessary technology to connect devices, data, and action which will assist in optimized drug delivery systems and early detection mechanisms.

AR and VR in Media Industry

The 2017 Global Entertainment and Media outlook forecast unveiled a ground-breaking fact that in entertainment and media space, virtual reality (VR) continues to be the fastest-growing segments.  The projection further states that within 3 years from now 68 million VR headsets will be used in the U.S. which will increase the VR content revenue to $5.0 billion.

These predictions show the growing interest of the industry in the adoption of immersive VR experiences in delivering content which is engaging to the audience. Though this might sound very promising, yet the stature of journalism is questionable as of now.

With the widespread use of social media, a wave of fake news spreads like wildfire and this puts a question mark on the credibility of the whole news industry. People are double checking every link posted on social media, every video they watch, and every news they read. The manipulation in still and moving images has ruined it for the news industry. People don’t trust when an image is presented as an evidence for something. As we are evolving and becoming complex beings so are our problems.

Virtual reality is now used by the news industry to regain their credibility.

The reason why VR is essentially recommended is that it puts a supplementary sense of participation in the minds of viewers. To fix the broken trust, putting viewers at the center of events which make them feel like they are directly participating in the event, is a wise way out. But is it as easy as it sounds?

Challenges for Journalists

The introduction of VR has brought challenges to the job of journalists. In the ongoing communication flow between the news organizations and the general public, the job of a journalist is to remain unbiased and present the opinions of all the parties involved.

Now with the introduction of VR in the news industry, the role of the journalist is even more challenging. For example, while shooting with a VR camera, cropping a scene or zooming in will create bias. How far can you stretch the definition of transparency for a journalist in the VR world is the main question here. You might crop something because it was irrelevant but it might be an essential element for the viewer.

There would be some ethical challenges as well. For example, in a world which is increasingly violent, how appropriate is it to make the viewers virtually experience a scene of gore, death and other disturbing news events?

Opportunities in Augmented Reality (AR)

The good news for the news industry is life-like and immersive experiences are not just limited to the VR. In the media and entertainment world, AR can also be used for content delivery.

AR is a charm for those who prefer to explore the world and experience action with AR technology to intensify their real-life experiences. While to those who choose to stay at home and enter another world with their VR headset, VR is still the best.

Let’s recollect AR with your Snapchat filters or the Pokemon Go game, where selfies had overlays of animated filters, now AR can be used to augment the various other aspects of our environment and experience as well.

This a promising start for the news industry as AR is already well accepted by the audience in the form of motion pictures, television, and apps. The concept is already well-accepted by the audience. The most important aspect is that the capabilities of AR to augment the relevant aspects of the environment while subsiding the irrelevant ones can create engaging and convincing content.

Are AR and VR diminishing social interactions?

It is a common perception that AR/VR are isolating individuals from the real world rather than connecting them to it. The main purpose of the news industry is to keep an individual connected to the events that are happening around him. This perception can be a natural hindrance to the news industry but this perception is not accurate.

There is a VR movie theatre operating in the world right now which lets people with any VR headset sign in and sit with a virtual audience in a virtual movie theatre. Platforms like deovr push this concept further, offering immersive VR environments where users can explore interactive content, connect with others, and experience entertainment in a completely new dimension. It also allows them to chat with other individuals before the movie begins. This example clearly explains why VR is not isolating but connecting individuals from distant locations and letting them share experiences.

What is in the future of the news industry?

The media and news industry never lag behind in the adoption of an innovative technology in order to reach out to their audiences. With AR and VR, the audience can be drawn deeper into the news content. Also, they will be able to experience the news story as a first-person. This is a big transformation for the conventional news mediums and should be taken seriously.

Deborah Bothun, PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Leader, quote “The next era of differentiation in entertainment and media is being defined and propelled by the consumers’ increased demand for live, immersive, shareable experiences. Consumers want to get closer, more engaged and better connected with the stories they love – both in the physical and digital worlds.”

Final words

This brings us to the conclusion that the potential of virtual reality is very powerful and if used to connect people to stories it will raise the level of empathy for events occurring in distant corners of the world. It has the power to pull the strings and make people put efforts beyond their comfort levels. In the current world scenario, all we need is mutual support and empathy. This will solve 50% problems in the world we live in.

The media and the entertainment industry now need to rethink the potential of weaving their current system around AR and VR.

The Importance of UI Design in Dashboards

‘Why to put a lot of thought into dashboard design?’

The answer is simple! Because your dashboard is the first thing that users will look at while interacting with your product.

It has to be understandable in one glance to be usable. Besides, all the brilliant technologies such as AI, Blockchain, Machine Learning are useless to the users if they are not presented in a user understandable way.

This is why dashboard designs require a thorough thought process.

Given, the importance of the dashboards, today we would like to address the popular query i.e. ‘how to make a great dashboard UI’.

But, before we dive into  the tips to make a perfect dashboard UI, let’s discuss the characteristics of a good dashboard:

• An effective dashboard is a visual board for simple conclusions of a rather complex set of information with a call to action. This means the dashboard provides information on which the user can base his decision on.
• A great dashboard is easy to understand and presents all the key insights.
• Besides being extremely intuitive, a good dashboard is easy to customize.
• In a very limited space, great dashboards exhibit all the crucial piece of information

Now, the point is how to come up with a dashboard which can pass for the above characteristics. Here are a couple of notes regarding the visual design that one must keep in mind while designing dashboard UI.

1. Be consistent

To be consistent means to have undeviating design across the dashboard. The design should be consistent on all the devices of varying sizes.  The functionalities in terms of fonts, colors, elements’ placement, navigation and style charts also need to be consistent.

The golden rule is to design the smallest screen first.

This approach helps in creating appealing spaces for more important information first and then leads you towards creating a great UI which enhances the abilities of the UX as well.

2. Simple customization

‘One size fits all’ approach is not the road you would want to take. Simple Reason being, usually there are multiple user roles with varying priorities and needs. Also, the designs ought to be scalable. Users should be the choosers on how they want to customize the design as per their business needs.

A good dashboard design should be able to accommodate all sorts of complexities and should allow for easy customization as and when required.

Some design tips that you could use:

– Permit easy modifications like field addition/ deletion

– For a customizable dashboard, use easy drag and drop interaction

– Cater the user with multiple color themes, if feasible

– Allow multiple options for viewing/downloading data

3. Communicate the necessary information first

With visual design, the vital information can be communicated to users in a usable and appealing manner. Also, with the crucial content placed and finalized, the design guidelines and layout can be easily defined.

Points to remember:

– The card layout is recommended because it allows concise data classification, along with scalability and flexibility.

– Users perceive the center portion first so the central alignment is preferred.

– Maximum font size should be 18 Pixel

– To highlight any important information a distinctive color should be used.

4. Prefer simple charts

Usually, in order to come up with fancy visual representation, designers get drifted and adopt complicated charts. Keep the charts simple and try to present all the variety of ideas in an easily understandable form. The main reason being charts are the prime data visualization tool for the users and should be easy and concise so that the user can perceive the information in one go.

Points to remember:

– Prefer pie charts, bar charts, and line charts as they are easy to understand and fit well in complex places.

– Use flat design charts instead of 3D charts, they are neater and easier.

5. Pay attention to the iconography

Icons are very small components of the dashboard but they hold great significance. A great dashboard should have icons which are familiar.

The reason being that a dashboard is frequently used by users and are accessed for prompt information or actions. Therefore, familiar icons reduce the processing time and deliver better performance.

6. Keep color psychology in mind

Colors are more vocal than you think.

Just as how traffic signals communicate to us with red lights signaling us to stop and green lights allowing us to drive, color psychology is important in UI dashboards as well.

A great dashboard should be designed with mindful colors and any possible confusion should be avoided.

Points to remember:

– Avoid going overboard with the colors used

– Try and leverage contrast colors for better visibility

7. Use the right font style and size

It is very important to keep both font style and size consistent while designing the UI and UX of a dashboard. It is highly recommended that not more than two font styles should be used. With minimal variations in font style, the dashboard holds a neater appearance.

It is advised to create a visual hierarchy of the written content for better visibility. This can be done by placing the crucial information in the larger font size and probably with different color and less important information in relatively smaller font size.

Summing up

All the above tips will help you to come up with a great dashboard UI but studying the user’s requirement is the first step before all these. It is easier to design a dashboard once you are through with user’s preferences and style because then you can customize the dashboard around the specific needs of the user. A useful dashboard is way better than a well-designed but unrelatable or complex dashboard.

An unrelatable dashboard is one which is not knitted around the individual business needs of the user. For example, a corporate dashboard for a school. The UI of the dashboard makes it great or just okay, the choice is yours!

At GoodWorkLabs, we have some awesome dashboard designs to exhibit for your perusal. Our team of experts can help you bring life to your ideas and create eye-catchy UI and UX designs.

How to design for Blockchain Technology

You might have read thousands of articles on how Blockchain is proposed to bring transformation in the world we live in today. In the next few decades, the possibilities will unfold into opportunities, it’s just a matter of time. Currently, we are just beginning to understand what Blockchain is and how it can be applied for our benefit.

If you are a designer, it will be a really tough task for you to design for a concept which is barely understood by its users or potential users.

But, an early bird always stands at the favorable side. Today, we are laying down 5 simple rules to follow for creating the UX design for Blockchain. After reading this feed, your curiosity about design for Blockchain will get satisfied.

Let’s begin:

1. No Jargon

Jargons can make any concept difficult for a layman to understand and use. As only a handful of people are involved in using this concept, your focus should be on how to attract more people to use Blockchain and how to benefit from it.

Terms which are already floating in the market such as Dapp, DLT, and altcoins make Blockchain overly technical and highly complicated. Also, the Blockchain industry has a bad reputation of being a phony scheme of getting rich quick.

To subside all these barriers is not easy and making Blockchain easy is the first step towards design. As a designer, it is your responsibility to make your project more likable and user-friendly. To achieve this, promote ‘no complicated jargons’ approach and focus on the value that can be delivered to the users.

In short, unexplained jargons can kill your design.

2. Break Down Barriers to Entry

The market is currently segregated in two kinds of people. The minority of them are determined and excited about the Blockchain and majority of them have no idea what it is and feel like outsiders. It is like an impenetrable bubble for them to understand and get excited about the whole Blockchain technology.

To penetrate the bubble is like to walk past a Bermuda triangle and not get lost. As a designer, you will face terrible UX and might feel completely blank at several stages. The reason is that this technology has hardly evolved much and there are only a few people available to explain the core concepts and walk you through the process.

The key to get through this is to make the Blockchain usable to the layman. Simplify it to the core!

Make it so easy that every person with internet access can use it. Here, ‘Coinbase‘ can serve as an example for you.

3. How strong should your security be?

People consider security as a major setback of cryptocurrency since all the funds are in a digital wallet, and if stolen, there is no way back and nowhere to complain. There is no authority regulating this. This makes the security of the funds very crucial in order to make the users feel secure and to trust your product.

To keep the account secure, you should offer 2-factor authentication (2FA).

But, here is the twist. If you mandate the 2FA for all the users there will be a lot of friction at user’s end and then you won’t be able to deliver a seamless experience.

To overcome this problem, keep 2FA recommendatory and mandatory for new users. Also, 2FA should be mandated for major fund movements to keep the security tight.

This approach will keep the users at peace and deliver the optimum amount of security.

4. Maintain transparency with the users

In Blockchain, if you deploy something, it usually takes time to process and get finalized. The length of time that it will require is never fixed and it also depends upon how busy the network is. The time taken for completion may range between 5 minutes to 2 hours.

In this situation, to deliver an acceptable user experience, don’t keep the users waiting around. Be transparent with them as users like near-instant actions.

To manage the user expectations ask them to come back in few minutes and report the current status as accurately as possible. Even better, send them an email update when it’s done.

5. Design Thinking

Blockchain has been promoted as the problem solver technology for many industries. Most industries have begun to turn to blockchain technology for solutions now. As a designer, it is important for you to define the problems precisely and design products that can actually solve such real-time problems.

Promote the practice of researching and user testing to indeed create valuable products. It is essential to penetrate through the hype and get original user insights.

Final words

A product designer’s real job title is ‘Problem solver’. As a product designer, you are bestowed upon with authorities and even bigger responsibilities. Blockchain technology may pose some friction in your already smooth design career but it will be a great learning opportunity.

Till now, the Blockchain technology has been more focused on the development part. The design on many exchanges and Blockchain websites is still in the latent stage.

To make the Blockchain technology usable for the layman, designers should work on simplifying everything. With the effort directed in the right direction, Blockchain will no longer be a mystery but become a part of our daily lives.

Are you unsure of doing this on your own? Let us help you! At GoodWorkLabs, we have a team of radical designers who strive to deliver simplified Blockchain solutions. Let’s have a word!

AI in Diabetes – A breakthrough in Healthcare

The National Diabetes Statistics Report, 2017, U.S. states that an estimated 30.3 million people of all ages or 9.4% of the U.S. population suffered from diabetes in 2015 and this count is growing every year.

These figures are alarming to healthcare authorities as well as to the controlling government. With an immediate attention required in this area, brilliant technologies like AI, machine learning and big data can be used to overcome the gap between those suffering and cured.

The economic cost to the US for diabetes care in 2017 alone amounted $327 Billion. This economic burden is getting out of the control with the number of diabetic patients adding every year.

For contributing to the cause, few digital health companies are taking the initiative to lessen this burden with the help of technology. They are leveraging technological advancements to innovate diabetes care solutions like non-invasive insulin delivery systems, continuous glucose monitoring devices, and digital diabetes management platforms.

These devices are the source of behavioral, physiological, and contextual data which can be analyzed and used to come up with more efficient diabetes care.

Today we are presenting some revolutionary startups who are making a contribution to help diabetes care evolve. Their contributions are remarkable with out of the box solutions for the problem at hand. Let’s take a look:

1) Livongo Health leveraging Big Data-Based Approach for Diabetes Care

Livongo Health is leveraging big data to help people manage their health conditions more efficiently and improve patient outcomes.

Hundreds of thousands of people are using their products such as blood glucose meters, blood pressure cuffs, and scales. The added advantage is that these devices collect data and send it to a larger database which is then used by the company for generating insights to benefit their members.

Also, this pattern has encouraged the startup to come up with a reinforcement learning platform where they observe the data and generate a variety of personalized messages to send to their members.

They learn about members’ behavior with the responses received and eventually know what works best for them. We would call this a good start!

2) Bigfoot Biomedical is working on AI-driven automated insulin delivery with an artificial pancreas

Bigfoot Biomedical, a California-based diabetes management company, is working on a mission to develop an automated insulin delivery system with an artificial pancreas. This system sounds promising and can make the lives of diabetic patients easy. The future of diabetes care will change with this product launched in the market.

The startup made it possible by leveraging the potential of AI to devise a closed-loop system that would observe and learn from the user’s response to food, exercise, insulin, and then adjust the dose.

A good head start is that the company has received a substantial financial support and thus the process of product development has fast-forwarded to the clinical trial phase.

It is just a matter of time that an AI-driven automated insulin supply system will become the life-changing diabetes care solution.

3) Glooko is providing mobile and web apps for diabetes care

Glooko is a global diabetes data management company which provides HIPAA-compliant and widely compatible mobile and web apps. These apps synchronize with diabetes care devices and activity trackers to collect data like insulin, blood pressure, blood glucose, diet, and weight.

The company is harnessing the power of Big data and predictive algorithms to empower diabetic care professional with tools to analyze trends and provide necessary recommendations.

Glooko collects data from over 180 exercise and diabetes care devices and then correlates it with exercise, food, medication, and other relevant data to deliver insights with clinical care and self-management.

These apps will contribute a lot to self-management and also sizeable improvement can be made in patient outcomes.

4) Virta Health is using AI to reverse Diabetes

Virta Health is a silicon valley startup which has embarked upon the mission to cater alternative treatment for type two diabetes without any surgery or medication. The company has already received 50% positive results in its clinical trial for reversing the chronic diabetic condition.

Virta has taken the nutrition centric approach which is based on ketogenic diet. With this diet, the body burns fat for fuel and not carbs. Virta has a user-friendly app which allows the user to enter ketones, blood sugar, and other relevant information.

Once the details are entered, the app uses AI to device a customized treatment plan for the individual.

Additionally, this app helps patients find specially assigned clinicians and health coaches for immediate assistance and consultation. Another great step in improving self-management!

5) Digital Diabetes Clinic by GlucoMe

GlucoMe is an Israeli startup which has invented a digital diabetic clinic which uses a cloud-based solution for remote diabetic care. With this facility, the healthcare professionals can remotely monitor the patient’s insulin and blood glucose and adjust the dose accordingly as and when necessary.

The data is transferred from smart glucose monitors and insulin pens to a mobile app which helps in monitoring and making decisions that support the platform to function.

AI and machine learning are used to generate meaningful insights and actionable treatment plans. The healthcare will be simplified to a great extent with the use of digital diabetic clinic.

Final words

Personalized treatment plans based on real-time data along with intelligent insulin delivery algorithms are the need of the hour. Technical advancement in the field of healthcare has a promising future and startup initiatives like these can open up a gamout of opportunities for healthcare professionals and patients.

Design tips for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality

Are you facing problems in evaluating the design of your AR, VR, or Mixed Reality oriented product?  

Today, we have laid down guidelines that will help you to objectively evaluate the design of your next project confidently.

Keep the following pointers in mind and you are good to go.

1. Identify your target audience and use cases

The first thing to do in the product development phase is creating ‘personas’ (a fictitious character that represents your target audience) and ‘use cases’ (the specific pain points or problems that your product intends to solve).

At any stage of the design and development process, if you feel that your product is not solving the specific problems or improving use cases for the persona then you should re-visit the fundamental design.

Therefore, it is recommended to test your product as early as possible with an external audience so that you can identify the fundamental design issues and make a successful product. This approach will be highly helpful while evaluating a design midway.

In case you have reached an advanced stage and have commenced the creation of a beautiful visual for your projects there is a risk of losing relevance.  Highly beautiful visuals may not be relatable for your users and that’s what distinguishes a great design from beautiful visuals.

How do the KPIs stack up across mediums?

In the contemporary world of design, your product is not only in competition with alike products but also with thousands of products across the medium.

For example, if your product is a game in the form of a mobile app, it is not only competing with other mobile games but other forms of entertainment as well such as escape rooms, movies, TV, and concerts. It is essential for your team to understand which mind space your product occupies to clearly identify the competitors across the platforms.

Beware! It is a common mistake to only compare KPIs within mediums. A slight progress in a VR product might be an edge against peer VR products but products on other mediums like mobile phone or computer may have already beaten your standards and have set a higher expectation for the user. 

So even if you are at the forefront of VR and AR technology, you are still behind the performance delivered by existing technologies. The user expects the same performance from your product in the virtual world as he is already getting in the real world. Popular applications like DeoVR demonstrate how well-designed VR interfaces can achieve high scores across all interaction metrics when properly tested with diverse user groups.

How were the interactions examined?

The common variables while evaluating the design of your interactions in AR, VR, or MR are:

(i) Accuracy- How frequently the user’s intentions match the outcome

(ii) Ergonomics- Energy cost associated with the interaction

(iii) Learnability- How intuitive an interaction is to learn

(iv) Time to Complete- Time in which a particular action gets completed

The priorities of these variables vary with the type of product. However, if any of these factors score poorly, your design is very poor.

You might want to consider the following points before testing interactions in the above parameters.

•  Currently, stress test interactions are not tested for enough time. For example, if the intended user experience is meant to last for an hour, the stress test should be done for an hour. The interactions which feel perfect for the first five minutes might not be usable for the whole 1-hour period.
• Secondly, some product teams make the mistake of getting samples from excellent gamers for testing the interactions. Studies have shown results which prove that users who play video games frequently tend to learn faster and develop their abilities to do various cognitive tasks very quickly.

Because of such biased sample spaces, product team often wrongly conclude their designs to have excellent learnability while it may or may not have it.

For several reasons, it is crucial to run all the user tests on the mix of non-gamers and video gamers with no prior context of your product. It might be an easy option to run the test internally but your co-workers will already have enough context that they can once again bias the user test.

In fact, any developer who has experience in developing AR, VR, and MR is likely to learn the interactions faster than a user with no prior experience in these mediums.

How can features bring positive KPIs to your product if used together?

A great design is created by the synergy of complementary features which have positive KPIs. Standalone features perform well but when used along with similar features they can create a rich social experience.

If your design has numerous features with positive KPIs but without strong synergy, you should re-scope your design to bring in more synergistic features and remove the standalone features. This will help you in delivering a higher value to the Persona and either solve or improve the Use Cases accurately.

How can Core Loops help to add value?

Core loops are the repeatable actions in your product, It is very important to assess the core loops.

Like if your game is about 3D vegetable slicing, the frequent action is to swing the sword-

How does the user feel while doing that?

Is he enjoying it? Are the sound effects appropriate?

Product teams spend most of their time in iterating and testing core loops. External users should be involved in testing the core loops for the reasons we mentioned before.

For getting accurate feedback for AR or VR or MR, involving external users is a perfect way as of now.

The art style and visual design of a product are subjective but hopefully, the above framework helps you design better experiences and objectively evaluate the core design of your product. For more resources on AR, follow our blog.

Why choose ReactJS for Development

ReactJS is gaining popularity these days and here we are to tell why?

Let’s begin with what is ReactJS?

ReactJS is an open source JavaScript library pioneered and made available in the market by Facebook. It is mainly intended to create rich and engaging web apps speedily and efficiently with minimal coding.

React JS provides the liberty of working on individual components instead of an entire web app which in turn helps them to provide the best feasible rendering performance.

With its extra flexibility and simplicity, ReactJS has arisen as the future of web development. It is estimated that over 94000 sites utilize ReactJS and more than 1300 developers are using for development currently.

Most popular examples of the use of ReactJS are PayPal, Facebook, Uber, Instagram, and Airbnb. These corporates use ReactJS to fix their interface related issues.

Now, that you know the potential of ReactJS in frontend development, let’s discern the point by point reasons to essentially adopt it.

1. Rich user-interfaces

With the liberty to work on individual declarative components, ReactJS is the first choice of developers to bring out coolest UIs and reap the cream of the market.

Also, rich user-interfaces are the USPs of any web entity and hence, it will be smart to use ReactJS as it is used by industry leaders. The best part is that with this technology, you can come up with interactive and user-friendly user interfaces at a very fast pace.

2. Speedy learning curve

Unlike Angular, this one is very easy to learn and use. If you already have JavaScript skills, learning ReactJS will be easier for you. An already Javascript developer can pick up the basics and start developing an impressive web app only in a couple of days with any ReactJS tutorial.

3. Reusable Components

As said before, ReactJS provides a distinct component-based development approach. First, you begin with developing tiny components called lego pieces like checkbox, button, dropdown and then wrapper components are created, which are composed of those smaller components. Once done with wrapper components then higher-level wrapper components are written. This pattern goes on until you have one root component in your hand which is your app.

In this way,  each component has been rendered properly and constitutes of its own internal logic. This approach yields some outstanding results as follows:

a) You can grow your codebase by re-using code and also, it is easy to maintain.

b) Your app carries a uniform look and feel.

c) It is super-easy to develop and conclude your app.

4. Quick render with Virtual DOM

In developing a web application, high user interaction and viewing updates are involved and possible performance issues ought to be considered.

Though Javascript engines these days are very fast, DOM manipulations are still lagging in speed. ReactJS caters to the long-standing issues of updating DOM with virtual DOM which is a DOM kept in memory.

Virtual DOM adopts an efficient way to accommodate the updates which reduce the read/write time which in turn enhances ReactJS performance.

5. Clean Abstraction

Clear abstraction means that ReactJS does not reveal any complex internal functioning to the user and keeps it smooth on the surface.

In Angular, you need to learn complex internal processes such as digest cycles while in ReactJS you only need to comprehend the states, component’s life cycle, and props to achieve what you desire.

6. Robust community support

ReactJS enjoys a very strong community support with a trail of 82,50,0000 search results on ‘react tutorial’. Developers around the world are upgrading their skills and are helping freshers to learn ReactJS. This contribution shows how crucial this technology is for today’s tech world.

The rising competition from other frameworks namely Vue.js is crucial. New render types can be expected in the future release like the ReactJS team is going to add a unique fragment syntax to the JSX that doesn’t need keys and with this error handling will be improved at developers’ end. In past, working on ReactJS was not this easy as runtime errors require regular page refreshing. The present version of ReactJS has come up with a completely rewritten server render which makes it very fast and ideal for streaming.

Why ReactJS is recommended?

For a business to have a competitive advantage the entrepreneur and developer are always looking for better techniques in today’s tech world. ReactJS is one of the greatest technologies for the frontend. ReactJS is a step towards better user engagement, higher click-through rates, and conversions.

Also, the updates of DOM is prevented with ReactJS which means the app will be faster and deliver better UX. This technology was first developed to improve website server’s total rendered pages. It is highly efficient with the capability to modify built tooling and maintenance budgets.

Final words

To get the desired performance from the professionally crafted business apps the best practices are important to be used. At GoodWorkLabs, we have a team of highly experienced ReactJS developers who can assist you in developing your customized web app.

We have given proven results in the form of raising conversion, cost-cutting, accelerating growth rate and demonstrating the major functioning of ReactJS developer for any business. For an instant quote, contact us.

Machine Learning Algorithm

There is one thing about the Machine Learning algorithm and that is there is no one approach or one solution that caters to all your problems. But you can always pick an algorithm that nearly solves your problems and then you can customize it to make it one perfect solution for your problem.

Here we are stating some factors that will help you narrow down your list of machine learning algorithm options.

But first things first, you need to have clarity of the data, your constraints, and your exact problem. For achieving clarity of data, do the following:

a) Know your data

To understand your data you need to look at summary statistics and try to point out the central tendency of data. For doing this, you will require to study the averages, medians, and correlation that indicates a strong relationship in data. The next thing to figure out is ‘what to do with outliers’. You can use box plots that can identify outliers. Apart from this, ‘clean your data’. Sort it for relevancy and segregate it on the basis of the problem at hand.

b) Categorize the problem

Once you know your data, you need to categorize your problem, which can be done in two steps:

• Categorize by input:

A supervised learning program is when the data is labeled. If the data in unlabelled and you desire to find an appropriate structure then it is an unsupervised learning program. One should know the type of inputs they can offer in order to choose an appropriate machine learning algorithm.

• Categorize by output.

Now, if the output of your model is in number form then it will be called a regression problem. If you desire classification of data as an output, it’s a classification problem. Another type of problem is clustering problem when the model required to set groups for the inputs given.

c) Find the available algorithms

After proper evaluation of your problems, you can opt to identify the applicable algorithms which are practical to implement using the available tools.

Most commonly used Machine Learning Algorithms

In this blog, we have listed out some of the commonly used Machine Learning Algorithms just to give you a heads up. Follow us for more intriguing updates on Machine Learning.

1. Linear Regression

This is the simplest Machine Learning algorithm. It can be used to compute continuous input data as compared to classification in which the output is categoric. In simple words, linear regression can be used to predict some future value of a process that is currently going on. It should be kept in mind that in case of multicollinearity the linear regressions are unstable.

Examples, where linear regression can be used, are:

• Predicting sales for the coming month
• The time required in commuting from one place to another

2. Logistic Regression

Logistic Regression can be used as a probabilistic framework or to incorporate more training data into the model in future. It is not just a black box method but it will help you to understand the factors behind the predictive outcome and so forth.

Examples, where logistic regression can be used, are:

• Fraud detection and credit scoring
• Estimating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns

3. Decision trees

Using decision trees alone is done very rarely. Usually, they are combined with others machine learning algorithm to build an efficient algorithm like Gradient Tree or Random Forest.

Examples, where decision trees can be used, are:

• Investment decisions
• Buy or build decisions
• Banks loan defaulters

4. K-means

K-means is used for the unlabelled data where the task is to cluster and label them. It is used when the user group is very large and you wish to categorize them on the basis of common attributes.

5. Principal component analysis (PCA)

The principal component analysis is used when the data has a high range of features and is highly correlated. In such a situation PCA will help you in dimension reduction.

6. Support Vector Machines

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used on labeled data and is used widely in pattern recognition and classification problems when the input data has exactly two classes.

Examples, where SVM can be used, are:

• Text categorization
• Stock market predictions

7. Naive Bayes

Naive Bayes is based on Bayes’ theorem. It is a classification technique that is easy to build and works great with large datasets. It is a better classifier than discriminative models like logistic regression because it is quicker and requires less training data.  

Examples, where Naive Bayes can be used, are:

• Text classification
• To mark an email as spam or not
• Face recognition

8. Random Forest

Random Forest can solve both classification and regression problems on large data sets. Basically, it is a collection of decision trees. It is highly scalable to any number of dimensions and has usually quite acceptable performances.

Examples, where Random Forest can be used, are:

• Predict credit loan defaulters
• Predict patients with high health risks

9. Neural networks

Neural networks can be used to train extremely complex models and these models can be utilized as a black box. For example, object recognition is enormously enhanced by deep neural networks only.

Summing up

The above pointers will be a great help to shortlist a few algorithms but it is hard to figure out which algorithm will work best for your problem. Therefore, it is suggested to work iteratively. For picking the best one among the shortlisted alternatives, test the input data with all of them and at the end evaluate the performance of the algorithm.

Also, to develop a perfect solution to a real-life problem you need to be aware of rules and regulations, business demands, and stakeholders’ concerns and you should have considerable expertise in applied mathematics.

What is the Future of Blockchain Technology?

Are you looking for an explanation on what is the blockchain and how it emerged to be the greatest technology known to mankind?

The blockchain is an append-only decentralized transaction ledger. This ledger consists of linked transaction batches called blocks and an identical copy of the same is stored on several computers that together make up the bitcoin network.

In this blog, we have narrated the journey of the Blockchain technology from its inception till today and the future of the Blockchain.

The First Blockchain 

You might be curious to learn when Blockchain originated. The original Bitcoin software was floated in January 2009 in the public domain. That time it was an open source code which could be examined and reused by anyone.

The idea of using Bitcoin other than for currency purposes floated later in the market. Namecoin was the first project for repurposing Bitcoin. It was a system which registered ‘.bit’ domain names. This is an interesting story.

The conventional system for registering the name was a domain-name management system that had a central database in the backend. The central database was government regulated and that made censorship very easy. To remove a domain name, the government just had to force the registering company to change the central database.

Namecoin venture devised a solution to this problem by essentializing a private encryption key to make changes to the records. The .bit domain registrations are stored in blockchain and now the censorship is not that easy anymore.

Initial Coin Offering: The definition

Initial coin offering is a controversial fundraising practice in which the creators of digital currency sell a certain amount of currency before they have finished the software. This practice provides funds to the developer to finish the software and the underlying technology with an early investment by the investors.

The reason why this practice is controversial is that this practice operates beyond the ambit of regulatory frameworks which are meant to protect the investors. Ethereum has raised funds following this practice in the past.

Blockchain: A brief journey till today

Here is a draft of events till date for your perusal. Ethereum landed a paper outlining in the market which stated that from now on coders can create their own blockchain-based software without starting from scratch and also without relying on the original Bitcoin software.

In the year 2015, ‘smart contracts’, a software application which can enforce any agreement without human involvement barged the market. This application has been used to place bets on interesting outcomes like the weather, which political party will win the election and so on. The process is very simple. Two gambling partners can place their bets on any given subject and then send some digital currency which will be held in escrow by the software. The next day, the software will check for results and send money to the winner.

Another historical event is when some of the well known financial institutions like the Bank of England and JP Morgan announced in 2015 that they would adopt an open source blockchain software called Hyperledger.

The blockchain is also used in the security market to make the trades more efficient and secure. In 2015, Nasdaq OMX, the owner company of Nasdaq stock exchange started allowing private companies to apply blockchain in managing their share portfolio.

On the same lines, Australian Securities Exchange used blockchain technology from Digital Asset Holdings, a Goldman Sachs-backed startup, to smoothen the post-trade processes.

The Future of Blockchain

The Blockchain technology is beyond currency speculation and has a very promising future. But, unfortunately, there is no other well functioning app other than currency speculation.

Also, the immutable record is a fascinating concept but as a society, we are not prepared for this level of transparency and records to be permanent forever.

The Blockchain technology will take a considerable amount of time to catch on and become useful in routine. Eventually, it will be used in lots of places.

In the future, many tasks will be automated which are now handled manually by lawyers and other professionals. Like your will can be stored in a blockchain and with a smart contract, in the event of your death, your estate is directly transferred to your heirs.

Your social identity will also be stored in Blockchain and tied to a token which can be used at several places. It can be used as your social security number or it can be used to login to your social media accounts, verify your identity, pay your bills and so on.

Also, it is completely possible that the future of Blockchain turns out to be completely different from expected. Some of the industries including Finance industry are working on the concept of private blockchains for several purposes like maintaining vendor records, employee records, and regulatory records. In this way, human intervention will be minimized to a great extent.

The fact that anyone can run Ethereum or bitcoin software on his computer has opened the possibilities of innovation that we can’t think of right now. The future is still bright for this technology.

We, at GoodWorkLabs, are a team of finest Blockchain developers who could assist you in your upcoming Blockchain projects. We work closely with the client to understand their requirements to its core and then smartly knit the development task around it.

If you have a Blockchain project in mind, let’s discuss!

The best JS frameworks for Front End & Back End applications.

Are you on your way to create a remarkable web application?

If yes, then probably choosing the right and best JavaScript framework will be the toughest task on your list currently. Whether to choose AngularJS or Node JS or React JS might be giving you sleepless nights.

There are several parameters to consider before making the decision like maturity, size, features, interoperability, dependencies, etc. Without in-depth knowledge, this is a difficult choice.

In this blog, we have laid out the comparison between these three JavaScript frameworks for your reference.

1) AngularJS

Angular JS is a client-side web framework launched in 2009 by Google. It was aimed to resolve issues in creating single page application faced by angular developers. With a large support community, it has an extensibility feature and can work well with several libraries.

Reasons why AngularJS is recommended:

1) User interface

AngularJS has the plus point of using HTML for defining web app’s user interface. HTML is less fragile to recognize and also it is a declarative language. Overall it offers simplification of web development process in which you just need to define what you want.

2)  Flexibility

Web app development is made flexible with the use of directives and filters. The benefit of using directives is that they bring functionality to HTML rather than manipulating the DOM. Filters, on the other hand, are standalone functions that are separate from the app. Still, they take care of data transformations.

3)  Testing

Unit testing in AngularJS is done by injecting mock data and then measuring the output. This is a completely different way of testing web apps in which individual test pages are created.

Let’s go over the technical aspects for choosing AngularJS over others:

Advantages of AngularJS

• Easily testable framework
• Data synchronization is done automatically between the components and model view
• Vast Angular libraries
• Inbuilt dependency injection subsystem
• Simple routing
• Angular Data binding
• Marvelous UI design
• Customized Document Object Model can be created easily
• It provides strong template building solutions

Drawbacks of choosing Angular JS

• DOM elements come with performance issues
• Limited Routing offered
• Scopes are difficult to debug
• Angular gets slow with pages embedding interactive elements
• Third party integration is very complex
• The learning curve is steep

For more detailed information on Angular JS, here is a guide on Angular JS to help you understand the javascript framework better.

2) ReactJS

ReactJS is more of an open-source JavaScript library rather than a framework. With this, astonishing UI can be built with good rendering performance. React is more dependent on ‘view’ in the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. It was launched to resolve the rendering issues of large datasets in JavaScript frameworks.

Reasons why ReactJS is recommended:

1)  SEO Effective

ReactJS can be easily run on the server and then a virtual DOM will be rendered which will return to the browser as a web page. This a benefit because search engines find it hard to read JS-heavy apps which is the main issue with JS frameworks.

2)  Excellent efficiency

ReactJS generates its own virtual DOM and also it takes care of all the changes to made in the DOM and any updates in the DOM tree. For gaining a good performance it is a great and flexible approach.

Here are the other pros and cons of React JS:

Advantages of React JS

• It offers faster updates
• Importing components is relatively very easy
• With ReactJS you can reuse the code
• JS debugging is smooth
• It has easy learning API and smooth interface designs  
• Fully component based architecture

Drawbacks of React JS

• The learning curve is steep
• It is not a framework and just a library
• Flux architectures
• If you integrate React into an MVC framework, some configurations would be required

3) NodeJS

NodeJS is a server rather than a framework which is powered by Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine. It executes JavaScript on the server side. Its main application is done for simplifying development of complex applications.

Reasons why NodeJS is recommended:

1)  Server-side proxy

NodeJS can handle numerous simultaneous connections in a non-blocking manner as it can be used as a server-side proxy. Mainly it is used when you want to proxy different services with varying response times.

2)  NPM

NPM(Node Package Manager) comes by default with your Node.js installation and gives support for package management. NPM’s concept is similar to Ruby Gems. The most popularly used NPM modules are:

• Mongojs and MongoDB
• connect
• moment
• bluebird
• pug
• socket.io and sockjs

Here are the other pros and cons of NodeJS:

Advantages of NodeJS

• The same piece of code is shared with both client and server side
• Big files can be easily streamed
• NPM has already become deep and rising at a fast rate
• Simple to learn
• Large support community

Drawbacks of Node JS

• Not scalable because one CPU is not sufficient to take advantage of multiple tasks
• Deep understanding of JavaScript is required to work with NodeJS
• Relational database issues
• Particularly suited for web servers and not meant for CPU-intensive tasks
• Nested callbacks

Summing up

All the above-mentioned JavaScript frameworks enjoy their own fame and are widely used across the world. They are advanced and deliver high performance. The major factor that will affect the choice of JavaScript framework is your business needs and desired app goals.

ReactJS requires you to write less code and perform more. Also, ReactJS is better than AngularJS when it comes to performance.

But AngularJS is a fully featured framework and ReactJS is just a library. AngularJS has a vibrant and large community support while React is just in the inception stage.

On the other hand, Nodejs is mainly created to build scalable and fast network apps. It is simply a JS runtime which is fast and lightweight.

We hope that this helps in the decision you are about to make.

At GoodWorkLabs, we have an excellent team of JavaScript developers who can bring great value to your project. Let us help you with your next project, contact us here.