Moving Towards an Action Logging Spec An example of the kind of thing that will be helpful for logging actions comes out of a more general discussion about tracking more general events. The sort of thing we may be looking for would allow anyone to track general events such as actions taken, exercise done, food eaten, measurements made or steps taken towards goals. These may be some of the desirable features in any kind of software developed:
Records or data points can be entered via any mobile device App, iPhone or Android etc but also from a desktop or laptop via a web browser. On entry, data types can be selected from a drop down list of previously entered or suggested event types Each event type may have different fields specific to that type. For example, if a button is clicked to enter a ‘running event’, this presents the user with fields to fill in such as distance covered, start time, end time, etc. For a heart rate reading, fields are presented to select after exercise or relaxed plus the pulse rate reading. Users can add their own event types, depending on what types of actions and events they wish to log. Users can then add different types of fields to event types The whole process must be optimised to be as frictionless as possible when logging events. The user’s own data remains theirs and can be exportable in a format which may be used by other apps.
The above outline towards a spec is strongly biased towards the active data collection methodology, with the user having to stop what they are doing and make a positive decision to type or somehow enter data into a device, whereas some people have suggested that passive data collection is the only way to go. Passive data collection may be possible for monitoring some physical attributes which can be detected by sensors, but many types of events of the kind which need to be monitored require the subject to do a certain amount of intellectual interpretation of the event before it can be entered, so there may well be a perpetual need for this kind of database entry approach to action logging.
There’s also going to be a trade-off between flexibility and design for purpose, with the actionlogr app needing to be tailored towards the particular philosophy behind the idea, rather than trying to become an all-purpose event tracking process, but where we end up along that spectrum does not need to be decided at this stage.
