System Design and Architecture of a Cross-Platform Mobile Health and Habit-Tracking Application for Nutrition, Exercise, and Growth Monitoring in Shelter-Home Care
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26821/ijshre.14.09.2026.140903Keywords:
system design, software architecture, mobile health (mHealth), habit tracking, React Native, Expo, Firebase Realtime Database, Redux Toolkit, data modelling, child nutrition monitoringAbstract
Institutional care settings such as shelter homes face persistent difficulty in systematically tracking the nutrition, physical activity, growth, and screen-time behaviour of the children under their supervision, because such tracking is still largely performed on paper registers that are slow to update, difficult to aggregate, and impossible to analyse at scale. This paper presents AthLead, a cross-platform mobile health and habit-tracking application engineered with React Native, Expo Router, Redux Toolkit, and a Firebase Realtime Database backend, designed specifically for Shelter Home Nutrition and Fitness Programs. Unlike a purely feature-level description, this paper foregrounds system design: it derives functional and non-functional requirements from the target use case, enumerates actors and use cases, presents a three-tier architecture, documents the meal-logging data flow as a sequence diagram, specifies the Firebase Realtime Database schema as a data-model diagram, and identifies the software design patterns (Flux/Redux unidirectional state flow, a thin repository-style data-access layer, and file-based routing) that structure the codebase. These design decisions are grounded in a structured review of fifteen peer-reviewed and indexed sources spanning mHealth behaviour change, pediatric digital nutrition interventions, screen-time health effects, gamified exercise adherence, cross-platform and Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) architecture, and mHealth privacy and security. The paper closes with a discussion of how the realised design aligns with this literature, its limitations, and concrete, literature-motivated directions for future system evolution.
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