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Case Study – 2022

Citizen CZ Smart YouQ

Bringing industrial-grade fatigue management and alertness forecasting to Citizen Watch customers through intuitive app design that combines NASA research with IBM Watson Machine Learning.

Project Overview

CZ Smart YouQ is a mobile and wearable application pair that gives users unique insights into their health and energy levels. WestLink designed the app exclusively for Citizen, enabling its customers to track activities and sleep, as well as engage custom psychomotor vigilance-type tests.

The application, with information and recommendations based on the latest research from NASA — and utilizing technology from IBM Watson — gives users the ability to continuously anticipate, optimize, and address their fatigue and energy levels.

WestLink designed and developed the wearable and mobile application(s) along with the backend system and machine learning models required to understand a user’s chronotype, or sleep pattern profile, and provide relevant recommendations based on it. The mobile application was also built to enable Citizen to continuously add key articles to enhance user experience without requiring app updates.
TIMELINE
24 weeks
TEAM
12 people

Awards

Award Image

The Challenge

Citizen is an established, trusted timepiece company with world-class watches. With the modern watch market shifting toward a demand for features like connectivity, personalization, and user insights, Citizen recognized the need to complement their high-quality analog watches with technology that could offer these features. As an industry leader, Citizen wasn’t merely looking to jump on a trend, but create a smartwatch reflective of their vaunted position in the watch domain.

Launching a smartwatch enables Citizen to combine its deep expertise in watch design with the latest advancements in wearable technology, software, artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide a new product with unique value that can appeal to the technologically connected consumer.

Early Engagement

Engaging with Citizen, we developed a project roadmap that laid out key specifications and deliverables for both the frontend and backend applications across mobile and wearable devices. To create a best-in-class device, our core team was tasked with developing a WearOS and mobile companion app that could deliver the following:

Enable the customer to connect their mobile app to their Citizen watch, which would automatically track and measure their activities and progress toward their goals:

  • Steps
  • Calories
  • Active Minutes
  • Activities
  • Sleep
  • Heart Rate

Provide an “alert check,” a psychomotor vigilance test (PVT), and user experience in the app to enable the collection of user’s alertness.

Utilize the user’s PVT tests over time to identify their “chronotype” and provide a more personalized view of a user’s forecasted “power” throughout the day.

Provide users with their forecasted energy levels throughout the day — a power score — based on their chronotype and PVT.

Generate “power fixes” throughout the day based on a various factors to give users tools to increase their alertness based on their specific circumstances, including the time of day, their power score, their power score trend (going down or up), and more.

Educate users with high-quality articles on related topics such as sleep, chronotypes, energy, activity, breathwork, and more.

Work Begins

To enable frequent iterations and updates to the scope and design of the apps, we introduced the Agile approach, working in two-week sprints to speed up the development process while maintaining flexibility to make changes based on the client’s feedback.

The Wearable App

Our application on the device itself was designed as a companion to the overall functionality provided on the mobile application, with a focus on tailoring the experience to the watch form factor. This included showing top-level information and facilitating a seamless hand-off to the mobile application if the user wants to see details and drill down to the specifics of their performance metrics.

Additionally, the overall watch and mobile applications utilized information provided by Google Fit and Google Health services which come out of the box. We also focused on ensuring that the watch application syncing and tracking enabled users to get timely and accurate information about their health and activities while minimizing the battery drain on the hardware.

Project Design

The Mobile App

The mobile applications are the primary device where users experience the value of the wearable’s functionalities. Here, our goal was to provide a broad overview of users’ health, activities, and sleep, and go deep into the unique value proposition of the application. The mobile application is where users take the alert check tests, which measure their alertness and ultimately provide their chronotype. The mobile application is also where they see their forecasted energy throughout the day, see details about their power fixes, and the rest of the functionality. Within the development of alert check tests, our team took recommendations from the latest NASA research and machine learning technology using IBM Watson to train a model for more robust and accurate predictive health information.

On mobile, our focus was building applications that enabled users to fully enjoy the unique features and value designed for the app and build a strong foundation for future development. This focus included enabling Citizen to add content to the in-app Learning Lab without mobile app updates, minimizing the effort required to iterate on and expand the power fix library, and providing analytics and data needed for the machine learning team to improve and expand on the alertness models the system utilizes.

Project Design

Research & Technologies Used

NASA

IBM Watson

Node.js

Swift

Android

WearOS

Python

The Results

The project, 24 weeks in duration, produced custom applications for iOS, Android, and WearOS, meeting all specifications and requirements laid out in the early engagement phase. The innovative use of IBM Watson and custom machine learning models proved successful in deployment. The resulting apps were well received, garnering multiple “Best Tech” awards.

Client Testimonial

Citizen Watch Company

The Westlink team is easy to work with, flexible and responsible. They are focused on getting the task completed and understand budget and timelines. We couldn’t ask for a better company to work on our project.

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