Social Health Status

A simple app to help you track your own symptoms and check in on the health of your friends.

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Inspiration

We want to give people a way to easily monitor the health of all their friends. None of the symptom/self-report checkins have a friends/social element. Its (a) great to see, and (b) could certainly help incentivize awareness and reporting.

What it does

This is a lightweight app to share your health state with friends and track your own state over time. Connect to Facebook, update your own status, and quickly scan your Friends List to see if all your friends are healthy. Check in regularly and optionally note your symptoms (private) to track over time.

How I built it

The backend is built in Ruby-on-Rails and the front end in Swift. The server is used for managing the friends graph and for saving/delivering status updates. We use the Facebook API both on the client and on the server. We require hashed tokens in our APIs to protect data on the server.

Challenges I ran into

Some key decisions: How to balance the personal use case with social use case (tracking symptoms vs. monitor friends). Where to fall between light and heavyweight check-in/information (sick/healthy vs. symptoms and beyond). Want to encourage people to share their status with others without feeling too intrusive.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Enjoyed building a fully functional product in 3-4 days - forces simplicity and a compelling specific use case. The Facebook API was helpful and easy to use.

What I learned

Ready to learn whether people want or are willing to use it!

What's next for Social Health Status

We are ready to launch this project. Though we did receive mixed answers from the app store: (1) approved by official app store, (2) rejected by testflight. ("We found in our review that your app related to the COVID-19 pandemic provides healthcare services or requires sensitive user information. In addition, the seller and company names associated with your app are not from a recognized institution, such as a governmental entity, hospital, insurance company, non-governmental organization, or university.").

For now we have taken the app down from the app store pending recommendations from Hackathon advisors on how to move forward.

There are lots of directions for feature development, so I would wait to see if/how people use it as is and what sort of feature requests they have. It would be great to team up with FB and integrate interactions like messaging. It is really nice to be able to quickly check in on the status of my friends. I hope we/FB can launch something like this.

We also have made the github repos public. If anyone is building these type of self-report/check-in apps and wants to add the social elements, they can see this code for reference.

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