Chapter 5. Enabling mHealth for Quantified Self
“Think: mHealth as personal health reform.”
Having an accessible and programmable health record sets HealthVault apart. It enables a rich ecosystem of devices and mobile and web applications. Chapter 3 focused on introducing the HealthVault API, and Chapter 4 gave a good overview of HealthVault data types using a data-intensive Quantified Self application. This chapter takes a closer look at building mobile applications for HealthVault.
We will look at an end-to-end example of building a mood-tracking application on top of mobile platforms. The chapter will cover elements of mobile client programming using code samples for Windows Phone 7 (C#). Similar interfaces are available for Android (Java) and iOS (Objective-C).
The Mood Tracker Mobile Application
In Chapter 3, we built an end-to-end web application that enables a user to track several kinds of data and use that data to help with self-experimentation. Many elements of self-tracking data, such as sleep, weight, and exercise, have the capability to be measured through devices; however, it’s very hard to measure elements of happiness, such as mood and stress, automatically.
In recent years, we have seen a surge in mobile smartphone devices. Mobile devices offer a very effective tool for efficient data entry and are an ideal platform to build data collection tools. So our manual “mood tracking” need could be served by an application that makes it easy and engaging for ...
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