What is Punya?

Our vision is to build up an ecosystem of multi-language and multi-modal tools and volunteer developers around mobile technologies. We envision volunteers working with relief organizations to collaboratively customize, develop, or use mobile apps during a particular crisis to perform a variety of tasks – such as data collection, notification of aggregate information to key decision makers, and co-ordination of relief efforts. The use of mobile technologies will greatly speed up these relief operations that currently suffer from lack of technology or insufficient human resources. The Punya project is aimed at enabling this ecosystem to exist by addressing the key mobile requirements of the humanitarian sector and opening it out to mobile volunteers by reducing the barrier to using these technologies.

Use Cases

Mobile App Development for Disaster Management

Experience Sampling Methods using Mobile Sensors

Shih captured contextual data about everyday mobile use with components of Punya and prompted smartphone users about their privacy preferences under different circumstances.¹ Shih used a number of different “probes” to collect information about what the user was doing, including location information, what apps were running on the device and when, etc. The Survey component was utilized to ask the users questions about their perceived privacy. The GoogleCloudMessaging component was used for scheduling push notifications to the device to initiate user surveys. Other researchers can similarly leverage these components to employ experience sampling methodology in their research apps.

Patient Diary for Sleep Apnea

Mobile patient diaries are apps used by chronic patients to record medications, symptoms, and vitals—they provide a convenient way for patients to keep track of their health data, and, when they are integrated into Electronic Health Records (EHR), communicate health data to clinicians for longitudinal follow-up. Clinical decision support (CDS) tools, added to the EHR system, can issue recommendations to help with diagnosis and treatment.

In many cases, however, it would be opportune for a patient diary to directly provide decision support: for urgent patient health issues, when wireless connectivity is lacking, or when secure integration with an EHR system is non-existent. Sleep Apnea, for example, has an estimated prevalence from 3% to nearly 50% depending on age group and sex², with a gold-standard diagnosis involving polysomnography³, a comprehensive test which involves monitoring heart, lung, and brain activity, breathing patterns, and blood oxygen levels. However, more simple home sleep apnea testing may be used to indicate the diagnosis in symptomatic patients². An app, running locally on the user’s device and outfitted with mobile decision support, can directly analyze the user’s health, based on user input and sensor data, and issue a potential diagnosis of sleep apnea⁴.

In general, researchers can leverage the Ruleset blocks, LinkedData and Reasoner components, to implement mobile decision support on smartphones. A dedicated tutorial provides step-by-step directions on how to implement a sleep-apnea mobile app.

Diabetes Management App

We developed this application as an exemplary prototype mobile app for diabetic patients to manage their diet, exercise, and medication input. Patients can enter their meals and exercises that will be semantically annotated. Upon submitting the form, a knowledge graph will be created automatically with the help of the LinkedDataForm. The SemanticListPicker is utilized to query external ontologies such as the FoodOn to retrieve the type and other ontological information pertaining to the food that’s entered. The Ruleset blocks are utilized to define and execute rules that can be used to ascertain if a particular food is suitable for the user’s consumption.

Project File: diabetes.aia

Demo:

Punya in the Semantic Web of Things: LDP-CoAP

The Semantic Web of Things (SWoT) vision integrates knowledge representation and reasoning techniques from the Semantic Web into Internet of Things architectures providing more advanced service/resource management and discovery. SWoT enables new classes of smart applications that augment real-world objects, locations, and events with machine-understandable data, annotated with a domain ontology, using mobile and pervasive devices such as smartphones, wearables, and IoT sensors. Currently, Punya supports LDP-CoAP ⁵, a SWoT protocol that enables lightweight, LD-based resource dissemination and discovery in dynamic ad-hoc contexts.

An example of mobile phone sensor sharing app is proposed exploiting the LdpCoapClient component for Punya. The app works as a client of an external CoAP server, publishing sensors and sensor data as Linked Data Platform resources, to discover resources published by other applications. A dedicated tutorial provides step-by-step directions on how to implement a sensor sharing app for the Semantic Web of Things.

Collection of Semantic Sensor Network data

Kinkead et al.⁶ proposed a mobile application for recording semantic metadata about sensor network deployments and experimental settings in real time in order to enable a more efficient and less error-prone data collection. In particular, the app uses the device camera to identify a sensor using their QRcode, and GPS to automatically identify the sensor location. Gathered dara are used to study water and ecosystem quality around Lake George (NY, USA). The quick prototyping of such research apps, by non-IT professionals (in this case, ecologists), requires an end-user development platform with a minimal learning curve. Using Punya, the ecologists were able to develop the app in a matter of weeks; moreover, the researchers believed that the platform could be similarly utilized also to rapidly prototype observation-based mobile apps in other fields.

App Building Platform Program with drag-and-drop

The push notification service is good at cutting through the noise and delivering the useful information to the hands of the people that want it. For example, field workers who use a disaster relief app might want to be notifid when the specific kinds of resources has arrived. Local volunteers who use MatchApp want to know when some people are in need that they can offer help. With push notification, an app can always delievers messages to people directly to update the most recent situation. Punya makes it easy for apps to use LD-based push notification to send up-to-dates information.

The sensor components provides many high-level components for access to smartphone sensors and personal information. For example, it has components for reading the GPS location, taking photos with the camera, receiving SMS texts, and sending Twitter messages. All the built-in functions are just a “block” away.

Quick Start Guide

To try Punya, log into our Punya instance with a Google account. Then import the applications below.

1. An app that queries dbpedia and generates a list [Download Project]
2. An app that queries dbpedia and displays it on a map [Download Project]

Creating Punya Apps

In these videos, we will show you how to create and use our featured app, WeReport. WeReport is an crowdsource app that allows its users to voluntarily generate short reports about what’s happening nearby. The report can contain a photo taken by the user and a short description describing what is going on. On the other hand, a user can also subscribe to the topics of events that they are interested. Whenever an event was reported by the crowd, those who subscribe to a specific topic that matched the event will receive an alert through push notificaitons according to their current location. For example, if a voluntary relief worker wants to know when there are power outage reported in the community and offer helps just in time.

Furthermore, you will also learn how to modify WeReport app to meet your needs. Maybe you want to build a traffic accident report app, or maybe you want to build an app that reports live events happening in a country fair! With a few changes in the blocks, you can have your own app!