To acknowledge this in my app, I’ve created a variable that keeps track of the current heart rate and stores its changes in an array of previous heart rates. This array, along with the time of the query at which it got new data, gets displayed on the “Your Health Data” page.

The LandingView file has a NavigationLink that allows the user to Navigate between the StatsView and StressTipsView.

Going forward I want to figure out how to add a breathing animation and also how to animate objects (such as a heart to replicate a heart beat). After that I might try to grab other data such as stand time.

Resources/tutorials I’ve been looking at:

Fetching latest HR (what the majority of my getLatestHR() fcn comes from)

Iterating through arrays (for loop in Swift):

Navigate between views (Navigation Link)

Heart Animation

HKActivitySummaryQuery (from Dr. McVey)

I made a new iOS project and followed a tutorial explaining that the info file does not automatically get created in newer versions of Xcode. Instead, there was a work around way to get the file created for you, which then allowed me to add the correct data usage descriptors to the info file.

Now that I know that I should have access to data types such as heart rate and stand time, I need to rewrite the functions that consistently update them. Before, the metrics were updated due to being part of a live workout session. Since the iOS application is not a live session, I’m going to attempt to write a timer function that will consistently make update queries.

Before spring break I was following some of Apple’s scheduling local notifications documentation to test pushing notifications to users. 

Scheduling a Notification Locally from Your App | Apple Developer Documentation 

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/watchkit/notifications/enabling_and_receiving_notifications

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/asking_permission_to_use_notifications

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/untimeintervalnotificationtrigger

https://www.hackingwithswift.com/example-code/system/how-to-set-local-alerts-using-unnotificationcenter

I had been working on a function “heartRateNotification” that would get called in the heart rate query. In this function I would attempt to display a watch notification saying if a user’s HR was above or below average.

func heartRateNotification() { //left off here..enters but no notification show on watch...
        print("in heartRateNotification..count: \(countHRNotifs)")

        if countHRNotifs == 20{
            print("should send notification to user...")
            let center = UNUserNotificationCenter.current()

            let content = UNMutableNotificationContent()
            content.title = "Stress Update"
            content.subtitle = "Avg HR is: \(self.averageHeartRate)"
            
            if heartRate > averageHeartRate{
                content.body = "current HR \(self.heartRate) above avg!"
            }
            else{
                content.body = "current HR \(self.heartRate) below avg!"
            }
            
        
            content.categoryIdentifier = "alarm"
            content.userInfo = ["customData": "fizzbuzz"]
            content.sound = UNNotificationSound.default

            //deliver notification after specified time interval...60 seconds * 1 for one minute..
            //notification only goes once ...repeats:false
            let trigger = UNTimeIntervalNotificationTrigger(timeInterval: (1*60), repeats: false)

            let request = UNNotificationRequest(identifier: UUID().uuidString, content: content, trigger: trigger)
            center.add(request)
            
            //**EVENTUALLY SOLVE THIS WITH TIME INTERVAL/REPEATS on timeintervalnotification trigger
            countHRNotifs = 0 //reset count to space out notifications user gets
        }
        else{
            countHRNotifs += 1 //work way back up to 20
        }
        
    }//end heartRateNotification

case HKQuantityType.quantityType(forIdentifier: .heartRate):
                let heartRateUnit = HKUnit.count().unitDivided(by:   HKUnit.minute())
                self.heartRate = statistics.mostRecentQuantity()?.doubleValue(for: heartRateUnit) ?? 0
                self.averageHeartRate = statistics.averageQuantity()?.doubleValue(for: heartRateUnit) ?? 0
                print("curr HR: \(self.heartRate)")
                self.heartRateNotification() //call to notification fcn!

 I was unable to get any notifications to appear…my thoughts on this are that the documentation I was following was for pushing notifications on an iOS device and not a watch. To test this, I’m going to create an iOS application that is paired with the watch app and see if I am able to get notifications to show. If this does not work there may simply be an error in my code, or I will need to attempt to use Apple Push Notifications (APNs).   

Registering Your App with APNs | Apple Developer Documentation 

However, APN requires a server and may involve a lot of unnecessary work.  Instead, I could idealistically utilize the iOS app and use it to display metrics gathered from my watch application’s session and give appropriate feedback/suggestions from there.  

A lot of these thoughts are just speculating on what’s next, so for now I’ll take it one step at a time. No matter what I’d like to create an iOS application to display not only metrics but also tips about stress information and suggestions on what to do in stressful scenarios.  Getting push notifications to work with an app would be a nice add-on to this. 

I was having some problems with updating values such as step count, supposedly because the update requests to display the live data resides in a switch case. To go around the possibility of never reaching an update value request, I wrote a getStepCount function that gets called in the case for updating a user’s distance travelled and am able to display an accurate-ish step count that correlates to a user’s distance travelled. 

Now that I have an idea of how to display and look at data, my next steps are to start getting into the stress side of the project. To start, my goal is to learn how to push notifications to a user based on heart rate. Apple has a series of HKQuantitiyTypeIdentifiers relating to heartRate: lowHeartRate, highHeartRate, irregularHeartRhythmEvent, and restingHeartRate.

I’d like to write a function that gets placed in the active heart rate update case that compares/utilizes these identifiers to see if a user is stressed. Eventually I’d like to pair this analysis with other identifiers that look at bloodPressure and respiratoryRate. Typical health identifiers such as AppleExerciseTime or AppleStandTime may also be nice to utilize as gentle reminders to users to get up and move around in a time period. 

Although I’m not quite sure how any of this data looks coming in/what statistics I’ll need to compare live data to, I think this will be a good starting place for giving stress suggestions. 

Currently the Metrics View still needs some work. I have been unable to successfully measure distance traveled or steps taken by a user. My plans for the upcoming week are to continue debugging to find out how to successfully request/update these values in order to grab other data that is more related this project. For example, once I can successfully grab and step counts I know I will be able to look at other data such as respiratory rate and stand time.

On Sunday night I was able to successfully able to log metrics values that were working such as heart rate. The log, paired with other documentation will hopefully help me grab other data correctly.

My plan for going forward to go back and reference the old tutorials I did and maybe look for some example code to figure out if I missed something here. Once I get this figured out I plan to start working on displaying live metrics on the MetricsView tab of the SessionPagingView.

Here’s another basic example I found on GitHub.

Although I haven’t quite figured out the live metrics thing, I’m hoping to just dive straight into making a watch app and with some trial and error figure things out.

One of the most important things I learned from this tutorial was how to generate a query using HKStatisticsCollection. The query takes a quantity type (this will be the type of metric I request from the user), a predicate (a time range to grab data from…this tutorial looks at the last seven days from the current date), and a few other things. I ideally want to grab data consistently so I’ll be looking into how to actively grab data (probably by having an app that can run in the background?).

The way the code comes together is pretty neat. Essentially there’s a struct “Step” that contains a UUID, step count, and date. In the ContentView file (what the user will see) we create a Step array called “steps” that saves Step instances when initialized. The “body” of the watch screen then gets a steps List and displays them in a VStack.

By connecting my phone to my laptop I was able to run the application on my watch. In order to access step count data I again had to request authorization from the user.

After a lot of digging online (and some closer reading of the error), I finally came across an article that lead me to resolving the issue!

With this progress I hope to finish the video tutorial early this week. I’d also like to try running the app on an actual watch too.

The tutorial was really helpful for starting to create screens and learn some of the specifics of Swift (I think it might take me a minute to fully grasp the syntax of Swift), as well as learn some of the features of HealthKit and WatchKit. HeathKit in particular is interesting because it will provide access to user health data — through it you are able to request that data such as current BPM or calories burned are communicated with your watch application.

Here is where I ran into my first issue: needing a developer account in order to access HealthKit data. In order to continue testing this I’ll need to sign up for the Apple Developer Program.

Below is a live preview of what the “SummaryView” of a workout would look like. Each subsection you see is a SummaryMetricView containing a title (TextView) and some sort of value that will eventually reflect user data instead of default values.