Prisma-care / Mobile App

Prisma is an app that strengthens the relationship between people with memory loss and the people close to them. It does this by providing a living, collaborative digital photo album that can be populated with content of interest. The content currently includes pictures & text added by family members, or relevant historical pictures and stories from heritage organizations.

This repository hosts the frontend of the project: a mobile app based on the Ionic framework. The app communicates with a RESTful API to gather and save data.

Be sure to check out our home page prisma.care for more information.

Contributing

Want to help out? First, peruse the Prisma wiki to learn about the roadmap, milestones and approach to developing software for people with dementia.

History

Project Prisma was part of Open Knowledge Belgium's open Summer of Code 2017. A student team coached by Frederik Vincx (@fritsbits) worked on it in July 2017:

• Michiel Leyman (@MichielLeyman) - backend & project management
• Simon Westerlinck (@siimonco) - backend & database modelling
• Jean-Pacifique Mboynincungu (@oxnoctisxo) - frontend system analysis
• Thor Galle (@th0rgall) - frontend & product owner

The app was conceived in a one-month collaborative design project in a care home in Zonhoven, Belgium, in January 2017. Together with personel and dementia design researchers the team honed in on a static prototype that was later refined during the Open Summer of Code. More info about it in this blog post.

Installation

The latest release version can be downloaded for Android on the Google Play Store. An iOS version is coming soon!

With some command line & git knowledge, you can also build the development version of the app yourself. See the following section.

Building the app

Setting up the development environment

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/Prisma/mobile-app.git
   

2. Install npm if you haven't already.

3. On the command line inside the repository directory, install Cordova, Ionic and Gulp. Then install the dependencies.

   npm install -g cordova ionic gulp
   npm install
   

   These commands can take a while to finish.

4. Set up your environment with API keys. Acquire a valid Prisma API key & YouTube API key (ask us!) and modify environment.ts with these values. Run gulp develop in the root to initialize the development environment.

Now you can run the app in various ways. Option a is used to test the app quickly in a web browser. Option b almost does the same, but adds in support for more features. Option c allows you to test the app on an Android device.

Option a - Ionic web server

Ionic comes with a local web server for development purposes that serves the application & recompiles on file changes.

Because cordova.js is not included, phone-specific features will not work. Notably, adding content doesn't work.

ionic serve

Option b - Cordova Browser build

Comparable to the previous method, but here a browser implementation of Cordova is included. Note that this implementation is not fully supported yet.

ionic cordova platform add browser
ionic cordova run browser -lc # starts a webserver, -lc enables live reloading & console logging

Note: cordova run browser defaults to Google Chrome and will crash if it is not installed. You can use the option --target=firefox to specify another browser.

Option c - Android live build

This method will build, transfer & start the app on your Android device. You'll need to connect it to your PC with a USB cable beforehand. The device needs to be in developer mode with USB Debugging enabled (search how to do this for your device).

On your PC, you'll need the Java JDK (note: Cordova doesn't work with Java 1.9 yet, install 1.8) and Android Studio. Additionally, make sure the right Android SDK Platform tools are installed. Do this in the Android Studio settings: in the Welcome screen, go to Configure -> SDK Platforms & check the platform that matches your device's Android version.

Now, make sure that the necessary folders are in your PATH so that the build executables can be found in your CLI environment.

On a MacOS/Linux system with a default Android Studio install the following lines need to be added to the shell configuration file (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ...). The locations might be different on your system, depending on where you installed Android Studio. More info here.

# Substitute with the correct paths & Gradle version for your system 

# Linux 
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Android/Sdk/platform-tools:$HOME/Android/Sdk/tools
ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Android/Sdk
PATH=$PATH:/opt/android-studio/gradle/gradle-3.2/bin

# Mac OS 
PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Android\ Studio.app/Contents/gradle/gradle-4.1/bin
# Make gradle accessible for the cli user (needs to be executed only once)
chmod 766 /Applications/Android\ Studio.app/Contents/gradle/gradle-4.1/bin/gradle

Now you can build & transfer the project to your device using the Cordova run command.

ionic cordova run android

The first time you run this command it installs all used cordova plugin commads. This can take a while.