The Stanford Spezi ecosystem is a wide variety of modules and components that allow developers to build engaging digital health applications.

Background

Digital Health solutions, including AI, mobile computing, and wearable devices, revolutionize healthcare access and possibilities. While each solution offers a unique perspective and functionality, digital health solutions need to build on a common, trusted foundation that fosters innovation and enables flexibility.

Our goal with Stanford Spezi is to be that plattform: spezi.stanford.edu. Spezi is a German (Bavarian dialect) word that can be roughly translated as “buddy” and is the name of a popular soft drink in southern Germany. The idea of Spezi is that a set of modules can be combined to build unique digital health solutions, lots of smaller software component “buddies” working toward a higher goal.

By being completely open-source, we do not limit this possibility to Stanford projects but enable a comprehensive set of projects to build on top of Spezi.

Project Focus Areas

The Stanford Spezi Project Planning Board provides an extensive overview of the open issues and priorities of the different Spezi modules.

You can either pick a comprehensive combination of different task or explore one focus area like a new module in detail. We will ensure that you can build and test the module into an existing application that uses Spezi to ensure that the module or the features are not build in a vacuum.

We also always welcome out-of-the-box ideas or suggestions on how to improve Spezi. A project can range from multiple guided open-source contributions to external partnerships that build a project with Spezi and want to collaborate on a research study.

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You can find a current and most up-to-date list of focus areas that can serve as great larger topics on our **Stanford Spezi Project Planning Board.** All focus areas are important for a wide variety of projects we are working on; if you are interested in working on Spezi-related issues, we will ensure that you can test and embed them in one of our projects.

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An interesting subset of current focus areas are:

• Expansion of the Android version of Spezi using Kotlin & Jetpack Compose: https://github.com/StanfordSpezi/SpeziKt
• Expanding the Spezi ecosystem for a wider variety of digital health applications including AI-based patient-facing solutions and on-device execution as shown in https://github.com/StanfordSpezi/SpeziLLM.
• Facilitate the development of EHR integrations by supporting server-side applications for Spezi including server side Swift applications as demonstrated in our https://github.com/StanfordBDHG/ENGAGE-HF-AI-Voice system.
• Improving and extending the documentation and general approachability of the open-source ecosystem.
• Support for new platforms such as visionOS and watchOS for most modules to support digital health research on new computational platforms.
• Simplifying and diversifying the usability of the template application by decoupling it from Firebase and featuring several useful core functionalities including the Spezi Web Dashboard and Spezi Web Service infrastructure.
• Your ideas for modules and elements that would be useful for your digital health applications as well as no-code appraoches to develop studies as demonstrated by the Spezi Study Platform project.
• A wide variety of issues on the Stanford Spezi Project Planning Board.

Important Skills