New Project: HealthWhere

I've got another Android project on the go at the moment: HealthWhere. It's an adaptation of a utility by Russ Philips to help find local hospitals and pharmacies, using the data from OpenStreetMap.

The plan for the project as a smartphone app is to use the positioning tools available to smartphones (satellite positioning, or just approximate cellphone mast positioning) to get the user's current location, rather than just asking them to input an address. The OpenStreetMap database can then be queried, and the results returned for quick and ready reference. It should also be possible to fire those co-ordinates over into a navigation app to provide instant directions. Just add water - or something!

Plan:

The interface is roughly divided into two halves. The first half is to determine the user's location (or a location to search in, if you want), and the second is to display the results of that search in a usable and meaningful way. Of course, there needs to be a bridging part which actually gets those results, but that'll be behind the scenes.

My plan for working at the moment is to consider the app in order.

1) Determine a position to search from.

2) Carry out a search, and parse the results.

3) Display those results.

4) Give an option to upload location data if it's not there already.

I'm sure that other ideas will occur to me as I go, as well, so we'll have a (5) Other interesting stuff.

Progress:

The first stage of the app is just about complete. The opening menu screen fires up and gives the user the various search options:

• choose between searching for hospitals or pharmacies.
• choose a search radius
• choose to input a location, or to use the phone's positioning features to find the current location.

From this point, the geocoding and reverse geocoding work as well, to either determine co-ordinates from the address entered, or to determine a local address from a set of co-ordinates.

The second stage is going well: the search query is constructed, and an XML file is returned which contains the results.

Next steps

The next step is to write up the classes for the different healthcare amenities, and to parse the results file into something meaningful.

Lastly, I'll be working on displaying those results as a list for the user to scroll through.

At some point, I'll also need to have a look at how to upload data as well.