A new update to Pebble’s Health app offers a new mood-tracking feature called The Happiness App that has one simple goal: to track when you feel happy so you know the source of your contentment.
“Our motivation behind this project was to understand how our mood and energy levels fluctuated throughout the day,” wrote Susan Holcomb, head of data at Pebble, in Medium. “We also wanted to know how different environments, interactions, and activities impacted how we felt.”
The Happiness app works by asking the user to rate their mood and energy levels on several occasions throughout the day. The app gathers other extraneous details — where are you, what are you doing, and who you are with — and even has a voice input feature that enables custom, detailed responses over the microphone. The app, which was made in collaboration with Stanford University researchers, sends the user a weekly email report at the end of every week.
“After reviewing dozens of commercial and clinical devices, I determined the most important variables to measure and designed two algorithms to capture the most salient motion characteristics,” wrote Nathaniel Stockham, Ph.D. student in Neuroscience at Stanford University, in Medium. “The first algorithm is for a general measure of motion called VMC. My version is a variant on an algorithm called Proportional Integrating Mode (PIM), which researchers in sleep and sports medicine have used for years. The second algorithm for step counting is slightly more complex. I designed it with Ron Marianetti specifically for the Pebble.”
Ultimately, the app’s biggest contribution is it makes users self aware of what really makes them happy so they can make concrete changes in their life.
“We found that the app delivered value to testers simply by providing them with a moment to check in on how they were feeling and what they were doing,” wrote Holcomb. “In essence, the app supplied a call to action — it asked testers to pay attention to their emotional landscapes, and to stay aware of the various activities that can impact their mood.”
The new app is available for Pebble Core, Pebble 2 and the unreleased Time 2, and can be downloaded at Pebble's App site.
