Iphone Medical ID

Apple has introduced Health App as part of IOS 8 and the app has continued to evolve through IOS9 and will continue to improve further considering how big the health and fitness tracking market is. While it is needless to say why health tracking is important, it is important mention a great feature which is not widely used or advertised - "Medical ID".

What is Medical ID
Medical ID is a an emergency card feature part of Health App. It lets the user add and store and quickly provide access to vital health information. Following are the pieces of data which Medical ID can store

• Name 
• Photo
• Date Of Birth
• Medical Conditions
• Medical Notes
• Allergies and Reactions
• Medications
• Any Number of Emergency Contacts
• Relationship of the Emergency Contact with the user
• Blood Type
• Whether the User is Organ Donor or Not
• Weight
• Height

All the information is optional and some fields can be left if the user does not choose to provide the information. There is a flag "Show When Locked" which lets the user choose whether to show the Medical ID from lock screen or not. Last but not the least is the button to delete Medical ID. Adjacent image shows a mockup of MedicalID(The image is taken from Apple Website)


Salient Features

• The Medical ID information is not included in the Users Health Data or shared with other apps according to a disclaimer at the bottom in the App. The is purely meant to be an emergency card
• From the lock screen access to medical ID is not too obvious. First the user needs to slide the "slide to unlock" which opens the the number pad to enter the passcode. Click the "Emergency" Button on the left hand side bottom corner which opens the emergency dial pad. Then click on Medical ID on the left hand side bottom
• Apple has been extremely vocal about privacy and how they handle users data.

Why using this feature is important

         In a medical emergency more the background information better it is, for this reason soldiers wear dog tags. It can save a life and lack of the same might even kill. It can help paramedics, Rescue workers, first responders to act and care in a more informed way. Access to Emergency contact information gives the ability to call the person who cares about you the most or whom you think can help you in a medical emergency - either way it helps.

Feature Suggestions to see in future upgrades

• Ability to share Health profile to better care for ailing old parents or kids or anyone else whom we care about
• Ability to get consent from the emergency contact that he or she is willing to be your emergency contact
• Ability to store advanced directives
• An advance directive is a document by which a person makes provision for health care decisions in the event that, in the future, he/she becomes unable to make those decisions. There are two main types of advance directive — the “Living Will” and the “Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care.”
• Access to Medical ID from the lock screen should be more obvious and widely advertised to educate people
• Ability to export or print Health profile which can be handed over instead of having to fill long documents at doctors office
• Health App itself needs to evolve to a full fledged medical profile application

I would highly encourage everyone to take advantage of this feature. Help yourself and help other help you

Google Wallet Failures, Potential and Remediation

I am an ardent follower/Fan of Google Wallet. But unfortunately I have been disappointed with the progress. So trying to verbalize what I think went wrong and how things could have been done differently

Background
Google Wallet is a mobile payment system developed by Google that allows its users to store debit cards, credit cards, loyalty cards, and gift cards among other things, as well as redeeming sales promotions on their mobile phone. Google Wallet can use near field communication(NFC) to "make secure payments fast and convenient by simply tapping the phone on any PayPass-enabled terminal at checkout." The app was released in the United States on September 19, 2011.

Credit
Google wasn't the first company to attempt mobile payment nor was it the best implementation. But it was indeed the single largest company with enormous resources, a new innovative approach of implementation, a lofty vision and possessing the ability to reach millions of people almost instantaneously. 
Business is a business and money is a priority, but what is different about Google is the mindset to solve problems first and worry about revenue generation later.
Google was able to trigger a race amongst competitors to come up with their own versions of mobile payment system.

What went Wrong
Technology of choice: NFC was an unproven technology with very less adoption. Google found it difficult to convince device manufacturers to make room for the real estate needed for an additional NFC chip, at a time when constantly slimming device size was the trend. Also not to mention the additional cost needed to upgrade the point of sale systems
Iterative approach: Google has history of coming up with amazing, innovative products; slowly improving one bit at a time; testing the adoption rate and if successful making it a part of the portfolio else completely scrapping the project. Some of the examples of scrapped projects are Notebook, Igoogle, Google Health and many more. As soon as google killed these products, many small players were able to get rich re-implementing those ideas. 
With Google Wallet initial UI was ridiculous and non user friendly, ability to add and withdraw money was not there, ability to add loyalty cards was not there, integration with google offers was buggy. Not everything can be solved in an iterative approach, Sometimes it is important to come out with a big bang. Google should have invested more time and resources to think about all the pitfalls
Marketing: Google always used an organic growth and word of mouth approach. But on a product which can a bite out of multi billion dollar industry, it is worth spending money on marketing. Actually, google did try to market Google wallet in the initial days, but that was it.
Piece of the pie: Google faced extremely strong resistance from Carriers, Payment processing gateways, banks, other competitors like apple and Paypal. Single and only reason for that is mobile payment processing is a multi billion dollar industry and no one was willing to let go of their piece of the pie. Google was needed to be pushed back.
Mining: Google is the power house of data mining. But unfortunately google wallet does not harness Google's search, data mining, machine learning capabilities. Google wallet has no suggestion features built into it like suggesting which credit to use, showing offers of a store when one walks into a store, offer suggestion based on history and location etc.
Clouded Vision: The whole premise of Google Wallet was the ability to store and utilise virtually, everything that a physical wallet would. But Google recently came up with wallet card which adds one more card to the physical wallet(what was that about). Google should have at least worked with ATM providers like credit unions to make using Wallet card free, which at least would have given the ability to get rid of debit cards from the physical wallet

Whats the solution
All the issues discussed in what went wrong if attempted to be solved is the Solution

• Figure out a way to use bluetooth or other standard technologies with higher adoption to power google wallet
• Spend more marketing dollars
• Make the product more intelligent, utilise its search and mining expertise
• Acquire innovative start ups in this domain to give the wallet a nitrous boost in the race
• Invest more thought into the design and implement cleaner products
• Just cannot afford to fall behind in certain areas like social, mobile. Google learnt it the hard way with google plus and android. Need not be said that Mobile payment processing is definitely one of those. Definitely got to be on the fore front of this wave

Intersystems Ensemble Useful Tricks

Clearing All the Message Queues in a Namespace from Command Line

NAMESPACE>do ##class(Ens.Director).CleanProduction()

This is useful when creating a new copy of an existing namespace and for other maintenance and testing purposes. Do Not use this on any Production Systems.

Get segment count in Objectscript for HL7 message
/// To be Used in rules to get the count of segments by segment name
/// pSegment is the name of the segment example "OBR"
ClassMethod GetSegmentCount(HL7 As EnsLib.HL7.Message, pSegment As %String) As %String
{
Set tIndex = ""
Set tSegCount = 0
#Dim tSegment As EnsLib.HL7.Segment
try {
Set tSegment = HL7.FindSegment(pSegment,.tIndex,.tStatus)
While (tIndex '="") {
Set tSegCount = tSegCount+1
Set tSegment = HL7.FindSegment(pSegment,.tIndex,.tStatus)
}
}
catch err {
Set tErrorText = "Error in GetSegmentCount: "_ tStatus _ ":" _ $ZError
$$$LOGERROR(tErrorText)
}
///$$$LOGERROR(tSegCount)
Quit tSegCount
}
This is useful when the number of segments needs to counted using objectscript.

Get segment count in DTL for HL7 message
<assign value='source.{PIDgrpgrp(1).ORCgrp(k1).OBXgrp("*")}' property='tMaxOBXCountInCurrentORCGroup' action='set' />

Value needs to point to the path the segment to be counted as per schema. Property is a variable to assign the count to. The variable can be used in assignments or conditions for further processing

Updating production from Command line
NAMESPACE>do ##class(Ens.Director).UpdateProduction()
This is useful when portal freezes or shows lck err when update button is used from the management portal.

Getting Globals Size from the command line
NAMESPACE>do ^%GSIZE
This routine provides detailed global size information. Depending on the size of the Cache.dat it can run a few hours to days.

Getting the size of cache and the free count
NAMESPACE>do ^%FREECNT
This routine provides the cache size and free space available very very quickly

This will be a work in progress and I will keep adding content to this blog

Love Story of Romancing Twin Primes

I am a Natural Number, or atleast that was the group I belonged to. It did not take me very long to realize that I belonged to the group alright but I was different more to say I was Unique. Only the creator of natural numbers and in a way everything else "The ONE" and myself knew how unique and Gifted I was.

I started on a quest to find others like me. Initially I found quite a bunch of them 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97... They were different alright but not very social. The more I searched the more difficult they were to find(the distance between consecutive primes increases as we move towards infinity).  I went as far as 2,003,663,613 × 2^195,000 - 1 when it hit me that may be I was not unique but rather weird. I was staring to feel the solitude and felt sad. I even blamed the creator.

Thats when the magic happened, I saw a beautiful girl as unique and weird as me yet different in her own way. She was happy cheerful full of bliss and non complaining unlike me about everything. I introduced myself and an unknown feeling strike me. She was the one I was looking for. She was soul mate. My "TWIN PRIME"

P.S
May be Geeky, but if one is passionate about something(Maths in this case), There is beauty and romance is it :)

Skepticism Around Google Keep

What's Google keep
Google keep is a new note taking application from google which is pretty cool and feature rich. It is just out and will sure be much better in a couple of iterations. It is a highly anticipated and looked forward to product. There was a storm of blogs as soon as it was released, some appreciating, some criticizing while more comparing it with other products like evernote and microsoft note

Why Google keep is Good
Google is more careful with security and privacy than any other smaller company
Feature richness is vital which google will meet and beat shortly in a couple of iterations

Invalid Skepticism around google keep
A lot of blogs have shown insights into why google keep might not be a good idea to try, pointing the recent clean up of product line that google has done recently. But, what one needs to remember is google has always provided ways to export data. They give almost six months to one year of notice before they discontinue any service. They also provide ways to export data to a newer product(google notebooks to google drive) or to multiple 3rd party applications. We dont not want to be stuck in old products when technology is pushing the limits everyday. Change is inevitable and needs to be embraced when it is for good. I do not see any reason to worry if google will keep google keep or not

Customizable Gestures For Mobile Devices

Gestures: An Integral element of Human Computer Interaction on Touch enabled interfaces
With smart phones becoming smarter day by day, there is a plethora of gestures for controlling the devices and actions ranging from slide, pinch, single tap, double tap, two finger slide, three finger slide, four finger slide, flick, curved slide, edge to edge slide, horizontal, vertical, right, left, up and down gestures for each of the previous ones described. These are very important and make our mobile computing experience with touch screens faster and better.

Problem 
As the capability of smart devices is increasing, the existing number of gestures no more encompass all the actions that we want to do quickly and efficiently. So, smart device designers are coming up with more gestures. Samsung recently introduced some non touch gestures which utilise camera and proximity sensors on galaxy S4. Google glasses and smart watches necessitate non touch gestures. Which means, room for even more gestures. Also, each device has different gestures for similar actions. The patents and copyrights make it difficult for generalization. End result, increase of complication and the HCI experience is deteriorating

What needs to be done
A consortium for generalization of some standard gestures can be a good start.
Users should be able to choose or customize actions of gestures based on their needs(example in a mail app: what action right swipe and left swipe on an entry will do should be customizable. I might want to assign delete right swipe and left swipe archive while someone else might want to assign delete and mark as read. Game apps can allow players to choose actions for gestures, like i might want the game character to jump of tap rather than upward flick), this will help users remember what they configured and be more efficient. If implemented right this can of great help else can be a disaster. This can also show improvement in creativity of developers.

The above are just some thoughts, there is no proof of concept that above suggestion will show improvement in user experience. I guess, its definitely worth trying though

Iphone Buying: Apple Store Vs Carrier Vs Best Buy

A quick inquiry of costs involved in buying a new iphone with a 2-year contract with some carrier in US seems as if it does not matter where you buy the iphone from, be it Apple online store or instore or some carrier store like ATT or at a retailer store like Best Buy. But a closer look might yeild a different perspective.

Apple store:

• sells only new devices. Does not sell refurbished devices
• 16GB Iphone 4s with taxes costs approximately $255 in california. even though the advertised price is $199. Taxes are always calculated on the original price of the phone but not the discounted retail price
• apple has a no strings attached return policy within 30days of purchase
• apple is not responsible for cancelling the contract with the carrier. A new purchase is locked in catract only after 30days. So make sure you call the carrier to cancel the contract if you purchase and return a new phone through apple

ATT store 

• sells both new and refurbished devices. Refurbs are slighly cheaper ofcourse
• 16GB Iphone 4s with taxes costs approx $255
• ATT has 30day return policy but charges $35 restocking fees. There is no restocking fees with apple. Restocking fees is applicable even if the device is not taken out of the box with ATT.
• ATT takes care of cancelling the contract if the phone is returned with in 30days

Best Buy

• Sells both new and refubs. Refurbs are cheaper
• 16GB Iphone 4s with taxes costs approx $255
• Best buy charges no restocking fees within 30days
• They also have a buy back program
• if the device is returned between 2-4 months they pay approx $340
• between 4-12 months they pay approx $250
• between 12-18 months they pay approx $140
• best buy claims that the buy back rates are applicable as long as the device is working and nrmal daily wear and tear is ok
• let us say the iphone 5 is released next summer and some one who just bought iphone 4s in november wants to get iphone 5, he can return iphone 4s at best buy for $340 and get the iphone 5 from best buy. But the carrier will charge early upgrade fees of $250