Watch Dog

Inspiration

Having veteran relatives, we were all aware of the types of hardships they deal with on a daily basis during their transition back into civilian life. An astounding amount of veterans coming back from serving their country suffer from PTSD. According to The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, it affects 31% of Vietnam veterans, 10% of Gulf War veterans, and 11% of Afghanistan veterans. Despite these high numbers, only around 8% of the 5 million veterans using VA care have been diagnosed with the disorder. This leaves a wide margin of veterans who do not undergo treatment for their PTSD, and who could benefit from an app like WatchDog. Apart from just veterans though, we were also well aware that many Americans suffer from general anxiety attacks every year. According to the Anxiety and Depression Assosiation of America, Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States. Researching this information, it was clear that we as developers could develop some application to help the people around and truly make a difference in the effects of Anxiety Disorders and PTSD.

What it does

WatchDog is a tool to help those with PTSD cope and deal with anxiety attacks. Whenever they may feel a panic attack coming on, they can launch the app right from their watch face and undergo breathing exercizes, while being presented with calming images, such as pictures of loved ones. The app records and presents the users's heart rate to the user while guiding them through deep breathing. Deep breathing can help to lower their heart rate, and the user can see the results in real time as their heart rate lowers before their eyes. In the event that the breathing exercises don't help, the user can use quick toggles in the app to call or message trusted contacts, and if no one is around, the app can connect them with emergency services. In addition, the app is also able to notify the user of an increased heartrate and launch the application in the event that they are in facts suffering from an Anxiety attack and may have forgot about the applicaiton.

How we built it

We utilized HealthKit and WatchKit on watchOS 5 to build this app. Health was an integral part of the application. Creating a program to retrieve the heartbeat detected on the Apple watch in real time was less than ideal. After 100 + lines of code just to retrieve 2-3 numbers was a little insane. Apart from that, it was also very difficult to link the data shared between the iPhone and the Apple watch together. Digging up ancient documentation from Apple, Iw as able to develop a more updated solution to doing the task that I positive those engineers on the Apple Watch team could make a little easier. But all is good fun for me :) Finally one of the most crucial parts of the application was the datastructure that linked it altogther, while it less than challenging to make, it was an intergral part of the program and the app woudl be nothing without it. Finally Finally, detecting the heartbeat elevation was also a challenging inquiry, but one we all really enjoyed taking on to make a great product. We really hope people enjoy and use the product that we designed. Thank you

<3 Sam

Challenges we ran into

None of us have built any apps for Apple watch before this, so we were all unfamiliar with the process. We have limited experience with iOS development and were hoping that it would be similar, but watchOS is much more limited with what you can do. These limitations required us to think of new solutions to problems we thought we had already solved. Also, a lot of Apple's documentation is outdated or written in Objective-C, which we have even less experiece with. And, to top it all off, Apple's developer portal was undergoing maitenence when the competition started, so we were unable to register our watches to build our apps on until an hour into the competition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to successfully build an fully featured app on a platform that none of us had experience in during a very short timeline. Not only were we inexperienced with watchOS development, but we also had no experience with HealthKit, which is an integral part of our app. We were able to learn how to utilize all of these technologies during the course of the competition, and in a high stress situation not to mention ;).

What we learned

We learned a lot about WatchKit, HealthKit, and the limitations of both. WatchOS development is not for the short tempered, as a lot of tasks that are simple to do on iOS are just simply not available on watchOS. The biggest lesson we learned during this Hackathon was how to adapt and to keep persevering, even if you're on your 6th developer forum searching for the fix to that bug you've been stuck on. As long as you keep a level head and keep pushing, you can still create a successful product. We also realized the difficulty in testing HealthKit code as well. Creating an algorithm to launch the app in the event of an increased heartbeat, we were not able to test the program initiallly after creating it. Luckily for us, right when there was an hour left before our project needed to be submitted, the program started magically working all of the sudden.

What's next for Watch Dog

If time permited, we would love to add the ability to sync your panic attack data with healthkit, and take notes as to your surroundings when the panic attack begun. This would allow users to learn from each attack, and hopefully pinpoint what kind of situations are causing them to have an episode. Empowering them with this data could enable them to either avoid these situations to the best of their ability, or seek targeted treatment from a [psychologist/psychiatrist]. The beauty of all of this is this data could be gathered from just their Apple Watch and their iPhone, which puts it in the hands of countless people suffering from PTSD and Anxiety Disorders.