Related Projects
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WellWellWell
The WellWellWell project is the predecessor to CarerCare. This was a project first built on the Android Platform to track pedometer, social media, and other telecommunications to generate a wellbeing score [1], with the aim of better individual and nationwide understanding of wellbeing. An IOS version with a simpler UI and fewer sensors was built as well for the same purpose.
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Care|Mind – Aid for Caregivers
This is an IOS app on the app store [2], intended to be paired with Fitbits, in order to help you keep track of your loved one’s health, and alert you to important changes in step activity, sleep data, and heart rate.
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Family Roll Call
This is an app that lets your loved ones know you’re ok by checking in by a certain time every day [3]. At a certain time of the day, the app will remind you to check in, and an alert is sent automatically if you don’t.
Related Technologies
Alternate Solutions
All three of the apps above have the shared purpose of tracking wellbeing of a person. WellWellWell and Care|Mind utilise sensors that are available in the background, whereas Family Roll Call uses one button that’s pressed daily within the app. The solution we’ve chosen is to use sensors readily available in the background and accessible from IOS phones, in order to help track wellbeing in real time. We’ve also chosen to put emphasis on making it easier for Carers themselves to take actions and improve their wellbeing in simple ways.
Alternate devices
The devices we’ve mainly considered for this project is the iPhone, and the Apple Watch. The reason we chose the iPhone is because it’s much more widely in use compared with the Apple Watch, and also because our predecessor WellWellWell was built on mobile as well. The reason android devices weren’t considered is because a separate UCL team is working on the Android version of this same app.
Alternate programming languages & libraries
For building our app, we’ve considered the two primary choices, Swift and Objective-C. We chose swift because of the development advantages in that it’s simpler to read, easier to maintain [4]. It also has performance advantages in that it’s faster and has more efficient memory management with Automatic Reference Counting. Within Swift, we considered two alternative libraries for the UI, UIKit and SwiftUI [5]. Although there were many interesting new features with SwiftUI, our team decided to go with UIKit early on since in the early stages, we were given the task of extending functionalities our predecessor IOS version of WellWellWell, which is using UIKit.
Summary
In summary, we’re building CarerCare for iPhones, utilising pedometer sensor, with an emphasis of promoting action by connecting to the messaging and phone functions directly from the app. The app is built using Swift, and the user interface is created with UIKit.