In 2009, WiseVoter made it to headlines in Indian news media. With a few volunteers we are trying to bring this non-profit citizen empowering site to US for the improving the health of 2012 elections! If you have features suggestions/ ideas please share them below.

Let me show you some awesomeness, and then I’ll explain what’s going on! Continue reading →

In the last post, we discussed how one can display the data retrieved from HealthVault Emotional State data-type.

I showed an interesting LINQ query which sort the HealthVault items returned from a getthings. Well actually turns out that we can do this more efficiently by using the max attribute on group filter in the getthings. The items returned by HealthVault are sorted by eff-date and if we get the first one it should be the latest item!

        public static void GetThings(string typeId, int maxItems,
            EventHandler<HealthVaultResponseEventArgs> responseCallback)
        {
            string thingXml = @"
            <info>
                <group max='{0}'>
                    <filter>
                        <type-id>{1}</type-id>
                        <thing-state>Active</thing-state>
                    </filter>
                    <format>
                        <section>core</section>

Before we get to the topic of this post and discuss how we can put new items in to HealthVault, here a screen shot of how the application looks like once we have enabled the put and prettied up the last reading a little bit –

Fig 1. MoodTracker with put enabled!

We can see that for each of the states i.e mood, stress and wellbeing we have a nice slider which lets the user capture their state and we can want this information uploaded with current time stamp once the user hits Save!

        // Save the reading to HealthVault
        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            EmotionalStateModel model = new EmotionalStateModel();
            model.Mood = (Mood)c_MoodSlider.Value;
            model.Stress = (Stress)c_StressSlider.Value;
            model.Wellbeing = (Wellbeing)c_WellbeingSlider.Value;
            model.When = DateTime.Now;
            HealthVaultMethods.PutThings(model, PutThingsCompleted);
            SetProgressBarVisibility(true);
        }

Lets get a bit deeper in how the PutThings call works. It fetches the relevant information from the base object and submits that to HealthVault. The design in this case might be a little wary since the put parameters are coming from the emotional state object as well.

        /// <summary>
        /// PutThings Method
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="item">The health item to upload</param>
        /// <param name="responseCallback">Function to resolve callback</param>
        public static void PutThings(HealthRecordItemModel item,
            EventHandler<HealthVaultResponseEventArgs> responseCallback)
        {
            XElement info = XElement.Parse(item.GetXml());
            HealthVaultRequest request = new HealthVaultRequest("PutThings", "2", info, responseCallback);
            App.HealthVaultService.BeginSendRequest(request);
        }

Voila!! We have an application which can read and update information to HealthVault!

Next Time: We will focus on adding the History or Charting aspects of this application!

Yesterday, HealthVault released developer preview of support for mobile applications. The associated Windows Phone 7 library is available on codeplex as well.

In this multi-part series, I’ll try to cover the details of building a Windows Phone 7 mobile application for HealthVault.

Now, the first question is what should we build?
Our product management team has recently been tracking their happiness and stress level on a daily basis. I have been thinking of providing a tool which helps them to track their happiness & stress levels and of course build great products..

Having said above there are a few applications in the Health & Fitness category of WP7 application store which help a user to track mood, but none of them combines happiness and stress, and stores it in HealthVault.

Fig 1. Mood swing application in Windows Phone 7 Store

Hopefully over-time we can make the application a fun one, may be add a social game aspect to it!

Well, how will the application look like?

The application would allow the user to input their happiness and stress level, and perhaps look at history and may be display a social game avatar of their well-being.

Here is a sketch of what the app might look like –

Fig 2. White board wire-frame of our mood application

Where to store the data?

While developing a HealthVault application a relevant question is which part of the HealthVault data store the application should store data in. As we browse the HealthVault Data Types, we immediately see a relevant data type – Emotional State.

Turn out there is also a handy tool to input sample data for this data type after clicking the “View & Edit” button next to the type -

Fig 3. Emotional State Data type

On further analysis it turns out that this type is almost perfect for our use, except the fact that we have to use a scale of 1-5 and there is an additional element – well-being, which we can ignore for now.

Next Step?

Now that we have defined this application, the next step would be to get our hands dirty and start working with Windows Phone 7 tools for Visual studio and the HealthVault WP7 library.

Next Post: Mood Tracker – Getting Started #2

I’ll be presenting and speaking at the Microsoft Connected Health conference on Thursday, April 28th with my colleague – Eric Gunnerson,  our talk is titled Developing HealthVault Enabled Solutions in 2011 and Beyond. We will be demonstrating and explaining plethora of features released (or to be soon released) in the Microsoft HealthVault product line over the last year!

Its always exciting to mingle with consumers of your products. Sometimes its reflective, sometimes its fulfilling and most of the time its insightful!

I’m looking forward to meet our partners and customers over the next few days. So if you are at the conference feel free to reach out!