I’m currently working on re-designing the main view of Health, a new GNOME Circle application, to offer a GSoC project for the implementation of the redesign. I’ve currently drafted the following:
So the main view would have a ListBox with a ListBoxRow for different data points, like step counts, active minutes, average heart rate and sleep so users can see how they’re currently doing at a glance. The green/red dots indicate on which days the user has reached their goal.
It’d be great if I could get feedback for the draft (or even a proper mock-up ) so that a GSoC student can work on this.
difficult to say… it depends on what is the overall goal for the app? what are its main usecases? health apps are such a broad field. I’ll just chip in a few possible areas of functionality that hopefully inspire possible designs, or that help at least to narrow down the focus of the app:
setting goals and reaching them (e.g., fitness, number of steps or exercises, as in your mockup)
keeping help journals (e.g., for diabetes, losing weight, sleep problems, psychological problems or episodes …)
tracking health data, self measurement (displaying and interpreting data from health/fitness devices, as in your mockup, but also: menstruation cycle tracker, possibly helping with different goals, e.g., getting pregnant or not getting pregnant)
getting good health information (e.g., links to such information, integration of according websites or databases. for example about medication, drug interactions, recommended vaccines, insurance issues, info about various life situations such as child development, pregnancy, health travel information, what to do in case of emergency, docfinder…)
reminder functionality (taking medications, going to see the various doctors at regular intervals)
sharing / managing other people’s health information (e.g., for children or elderly persons)
document storage (archiving medical documents such as doctor’s letters, laboratory findings, medical images etc) and document sharing
import/export: what will be the underlying data model in GNOME health? I think it is important to allow importing/exporting of data, i.e., to allow not just to get data in, but also to get data back out, in output format suitable for humans but also in structured formats that are understood by other apps.
setting goals and reaching them (e.g., fitness, number of steps or exercises, as in your mockup)
That’s the main usage of Health,
keeping help journals (e.g., for diabetes, losing weight, sleep problems, psychological problems or episodes …)
Currently there’s some discussion about adding this to Health, since Health data tends to be pretty interconnected (if you don’t sleep well you probably won’t do well at excercising/will feel exhausted and if you dont excercise you probably won’t sleep well), so Health may include parts of that. E.g. a weight log and sleep problems/interruptions during sleep probably make sense to integrate into Health.
reminder functionality
Probably makes sense, at least for meeting goals (e.g. remind the user to reach their step goal)
import/export: what will be the underlying data model in GNOME health? I think it is important to allow importing/exporting of data, i.e., to allow not just to get data in, but also to get data back out, in output format suitable for humans but also in structured formats that are understood by other apps.
Health can currently export & import data as CSV. It’s also possible to sync with 3rd party providers, e.g. Google Fit.
The other points are probably out of scope of Health.
For people like me wondering what the initial post of this thread was refering to:
Google just showed me
So it seems to be about a Gnome app related to health monitoring. I have still no detailed idea, as the screenshot from that page can not be loaded. But in the description we can read “A health tracking app for the GNOME desktop.”. Well my desktop PC has no sensors at all currently, but some people may have a mic or a webcan. But can we collect good heath data from face color or breath sound? Or would we have to buy sensor equipment?
Ah, should’ve posted a link here. The repo for Health is here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Cogitri/Health (just deleted the GitHub repo, kind of forgot it existed, sorry about that).
Currently you can either manually add data to Health (e.g. if you took a 20 minute walk you can enter that into Health and it’ll estimate how many steps you’ve taken/how many calories that burned etc.), but the best way to use Health is synching with a third party provider (currently only Google Fit is supported) to sync data between your phone and desktop. In the future it may be possible to sync data directly from your bluetooth devices into Health, but that’ll probably take some time to implement.
Also, once linux phones have better battery life it should be possible to track steps via your phone’s sensors
) so that a GSoC student can work on this.