Presenting… Sleepio Labs (the prototype)
The second of our hackathon prototypes. You can find our first post here
We’re Killian and Ed, a couple of developers at Big Health. We spend most of our time working on Sleepio, our web and iOS-based CBT program helping people overcome poor sleep. A huge part of the Sleepio program is the Sleep Diary tool where users can record details of how they slept each night, either manually or by importing data from their tracking device.
Among other things, the Sleep Diary helps users track their progress through the program and gives them a deeper insight into their own sleep. Adding a diary on the iOS app looks like this:
For our hackathon prototype we were keen to give users a fresh way to explore their own data, so over our two-day hackathon we designed and built a tool we rather grandly named Sleepio Labs. In its first iteration Sleepio Labs aggregates and visualises sleep data according to the day of the week. Our objective is to empower users to find patterns in their own data and use this knowledge (along with the tools and techniques Sleepio provides) to improve their sleep and their lives.
Like our Sleep Diary tool, Sleepio Labs has interfaces on both web and iOS. The web interface provides you with average scores per day for three different sleep metrics taken from your sleep diaries. This is what fictional Bob’s Sleepio Labs page looks like:
You can see Bob’s time spent asleep is much lower on Tuesday nights — at this point Bob can start thinking about what might be causing this. Does he drink more coffee that day? If so, he can try to cut down. Maybe the bins get collected that day and wake Bob up early — if so, he could try wearing earplugs at night. Hopefully by now you’re getting an idea of the power of this kind of approach; this data is an amazing resource, and being able to harness it in new ways is really exciting.
The same feature on iOS looks like this:
The idea is the same, but there are a couple of different features. The iOS implementation offers the same averages over time, but also gives users the opportunity to drill down so they can follow their progress for individual days. Bob thinks he usually sleeps pretty well on Monday nights, but his average is lower than he thought. On further investigation, he sees that on Monday three weeks ago his time in bed was much lower than normal. But of course! That was the night of his office party 🎉🎉🎉.
This is just the beginning, of course. As is usually the case with proofs-of-concept and hackathons in general, it’s really exciting to think about how this data could be integrated with the tagging feature already built into the Sleep Diary tool for a really cohesive experience!
The Technical Bits
Both interfaces are based on a new JSON API endpoint we built on our standard Flask backend. The web version is built with the React framework, which handles both displaying the frontend and talking to the API. On iOS we used a pretty standard UITableViewController approach and charted everything using a cool charting library from Jawbone.
If you like the sound of how we do things at Big Health, check out our jobs page! To stay up to date with us, you should follow us here on Medium or on Twitter.
