Be well with BeWell

Remember my story about Health Foo a few days ago, where I mentioned a new app being worked on by Tanzeem Choudhury?  Well, it's live now.  You can find it here.

Tanzeem notes: 

This is joint effort by my group and Andrew Campbell's lab at Dartmouth (where I was before moving to Cornell in the Fall of 2011.)

We are looking for critical and constructive feedback so we can keep improving. So any input is good input.  Email at bewellapp [at] gmail [dot] com. 

It is described as follows:

BeWell: the next generation in mobile health apps.

A key challenge for mobile health apps is assisting people in maintaining a healthy lifestyle by automatically keeping track of their everyday behaviors without burdening them.

The BeWell app continuously tracks user behaviors along three key health dimensions without requiring any user input — the user simply downloads the app and uses the phone as usual

How does it do this? Classification algorithms run directly on the phone to automatically infer the user's sleep duration, physical activity, and social interaction. In addition to classifying activities that influence health, BeWell also computes a weighted score between 0 and 100 for each health dimension. A score of a 100 indicates that the user is matching or exceeding recommended guidelines (averaging eight hours sleep per day, for example). BeWell also promotes improved behavioral patterns via persuasive feedback as part of an animated aquatic ecosystem rendered as an ambient display on the smartphone's wallpaper screen.

BeWell is continuous sensing app that runs in the background and may impact your battery lifetime. BeWell is currently designed to run on newer, top end phones with better battery life. The user can remove the active wallpaper and run BeWell+ in the background to minimize battery draw if this is an issue.

BeWell has been tested on a limited number of Android phones: Nexus S, Nexus Galaxy, HTC one. We can't guarantee the performance of the app on other phones.