Reducing compute costs to better serve vulnerable people mental health care with Mentech
Meet Mentech
Mentech leverages DoiT and AWS Teams to reduce their cloud spend by 10% and reduce issues by 30%
Mentech is a Dutch company founded to give vulnerable people a voice. Those people with significant health challenges like dementia or intellectual disabilities can struggle to advocate for their emotional and physical needs โ often at the expense of getting appropriate medical care. โMisunderstood behaviour is often caused by stress, and stress can be measured with physiological parameters,โ says Reon Smits, co-founder and CTO, Mentech. โTo help vulnerable people and their caregivers, we needed a way to measure, visualize and communicate stress and stress build-up in order to get appropriate healthcare. Thatโs the idea behind Mentech.โ
The Challenge
Mentech developed their flagship product HUME, a powerful system that measures stress in real time, based on data collected via biofeedback sensors and artificial intelligence models to translate physiology into a stress-response. Wearables include a chest strap, a patch, and a sock with sensors, giving a range of options that suit different peopleโs comfort levels. The data gathered can be displayed in a dashboard on a tablet or smartphone, where caregivers can view stress levels, receive early warnings of rising stress, and investigate the causes of stress with diagnostic insights.
As a โdigital nativeโ, Mentech developed its software solution in a cloud environment from the start, working with AWS cloud solutions like AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Container Service. Mentechโs small, young IT team built everything themselves, tailored to meet the needs of the business and their solutions. But as the company and its user base grew, product stability became an increasing IT priority; the team needed to optimize its cloud environment for reliability and efficiency.
โWe had a great foundation, and now we needed expertise to help us run our solution more efficiently, and to make sure it can scale with our growth,โ says Smits. โWith their in-depth knowledge of AWS cloud services and its around-the-clock technical support, DoiT offered exactly what we were looking for to grow our cloud capabilities to better serve our customers and our business โ without the runaway costs and resources..โ
The Solution
Like many startups and scaleups, Mentech didnโt have resourcesโbudget or peopleโto waste; it needed to hit the ground running and deliver efficient scaling quickly. But to support Mentechโs business over a longer term, Smits and his team wanted to build up their own cloud expertise. DoiT helped with both, quickly tackling the most pressing technology needs while providing tailored training sessions to build up the Mentech teamโs knowledge base. DoiTโs close collaboration with AWS also offered Mentech a direct line to the AWS product teams underpinning Mentechโs infrastructure.
Modernizing the data layer to increase reliability and reduce costs by 60%
There were a couple of known issues Smits and his team wanted to solve first. They were using an external SQL database, for example, which filled up too quickly, leading to increased costs.
โDoiT helped us to move from a monolithic and vertically scaling database that kept getting more expensive to a horizontally scaling solution that costs 60 % less,โ says Sakis Kasampalis, Software Architect at Mentech. โWe did it by migrating our large monolithic database to a combination of fine-grained AWS services: Amazon Timestream for the real-time data, Amazon S3 as the long-term storage, and Amazon Aurora for a short-lived subset of our data.โ
Another issue was backpressure. Mentechโs system sometimes struggled to handle all incoming data from usersโ wearables. With support from DoiT and AWS, the team identified the causes and took steps to improve the system, for example by storing metadata on Amazon RDS instead of Amazon S3 and by replacing HTTP 1.1 with HTTP/2. As a result, tickets raised and errors detected have dropped, showing a system reliability improved by at least 30%.
โWe knew there was an issue with back pressure in our system, but we didnโt know where it came from or how to solve it,โ says Smits. โIt takes quite a lot of in-depth knowledge with AWS to find a solution for these more difficult problems, and thatโs exactly what DoiT delivered.โ
Finding infrastructure weaknesses with a Well-Architected Framework Review
After solving the systemโs most pressing cost and reliability issues, it was time to really optimize the infrastructure for maximum efficiency. DoiT led Mentech through a comprehensive AWS Well-Architected Framework Review, a systematic and proprietary approach to compare a companyโs AWS workloads against AWS best practices. With support from the DoiT team, Mentech reviewed the results and implemented the recommended changes. Two such changes were to add a backup system for its databases to avoid data loss in the event of a crash, and to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase security. Both of these changes helped Mentech increase its uptime and strengthen the security posture of its infrastructure.
โThe Well-Architected Framework Review that DoiT led helped us to really pinpoint the weaknesses in our cloud infrastructure, and then to systematically improve the scalability and general reliability of our systems. With these recommendations and others, weโre now confident that our architecture is sound, especially after solving our data warehouse and NAT gateway issues,โ says Kasampalis. โWorking with DoiT was an excellent experience for us, as they leveraged AWS technologies to enhance our cloud environment, increase productivity and reduce cloud spending by 10%.โ
The Results
Boosting user growth with a future-proof, scalable foundation
DoiTโs deep cloud expertise gave Mentech the confidence to grow its business as it scaled up and needed a more reliable and efficient cloud environment. Since the beginning of its partnership with DoiT and AWS, the HUME user base has grown by 5ร, and the system is now designed to handle an even bigger influx of customers and traffic. The system is now designed to automatically remediate potential failures, ensuring that customers can have complete confidence in the solutionโs reliability.
โBy helping to fix infrastructure issues we had in the past, DoiT helped us grow our user base significantly,โ says Smits. โMore importantly, DoiT helped us to build scalability into our systems. As a result, weโre simply able to handle a lot more users than before, which will enable us to grow and scale without any issues.โ
Fixing issues twice as fast while reducing overall cloud spend by 10%
While serving more customers, Mentech is also operating much more efficiently. โThanks to close support from DoiT and AWS, we managed to lower our AWS hosting costs by 10 %, and weโll probably be able to reduce it even more,โ says Smits. And because time is money, too, the savings continue in the productivity department: โWe are also able to fix issues twice as fast as if we had done it on our own. This enabled our team to focus more time on value-generating work and other projects.โ
Thereโs no shortage of projects in the works at Mentech, and HUME is only the beginning. Besides bringing its stress recognition technology to more vulnerable people and caregivers around the world, Smits and the Mentech team have an even broader vision for the tool.
โInsights into stress levels can be valuable for many other use cases, so the HUME will be able to help a lot more people in the future,โ says Smits. โPeople with autism, people experiencing mental health issues, or those dealing with burnout, for example, could use the HUME to better understand and manage their behavior.โ
What's next?
Mentech will continue its collaboration with DoiT, a partnership Smits calls โone-of-a-kindโ. โWith their knowledge and expertise around AWS and other technologies, DoiT has been, and continues to be, an essential partner for Mentech,โ says Smits. โThis collaboration is a perfect illustration of how two companies can enhance each other’s strengths through joint efforts. DoiT has helped us to provide better solutions at a lower cost, which is critical to our mission to give vulnerable people a voice.โ