Скачать или смотреть Healthy Text Scheduler - An Alexa Skill To Help Improve Your Eating Habits

NOTE: The latest version, as described in this video, was certified on Monday, 9/5/2022 by Amazon and is available to enable through the Alexa App on your smartphone. Many thanks to the certification team for their quick review of Healthy Text Scheduler over this holiday weekend, especially since I submitted it on Friday afternoon!

Healthy Text Scheduler is another entry of mine into the Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge - Aging & Engaging Hackathon.

Most people who are changing their nutrition and exercise habits to lose weight have trouble putting what they know they should do into practice. The problem is that their usual unhealthy behaviors are so automatic that they need help remembering to substitute their new healthier behaviors when the occasion arises. This is where Healthy Text Scheduler comes in!

With Healthy Text Scheduler, you schedule text messages to yourself to give you encouragement and tips to help you stick to your weight loss plan just when you need them. After a one-time registration where you provide your cell phone number, cell phone company & the name by which you’d like to be identified, you can schedule as many text programs as you’d like. For each series, you set the starting date, starting time, end date, and your time zone.

Perhaps some background about its development is in order -
During my career, I held medical director positions with several chronic care/disease management companies and led teams of clinicians to help identified patients improve their behaviors around activities that could keep them healthier. Consequently, I studied several behavior-change models and coached my staff in their use with our patients. A pivotal event in using those strategies personally was in response to a near-fatal heart attack I sustained in late 2003. I was determined to apply those strategies that I promoted to the patients under my care to my own eating and exercise habits. It took a lot of effort to implement healthier habits, but thanks to those efforts I was blessed to see my own two children graduate college, get married and enjoy fun activities with my grandchildren. It hasn’t been smooth sailing, but those improved habits have helped me withstand the downturns over the decades. In retrospect, I believe that my initial cardiac rehabilitation efforts were part of my motivation for starting to build an interactive website in 2005 called InsightsForHealth.com. It provides tools for its users to make improvements in their nutrition and exercise behaviors. Part of my drive was to share those strategies that have worked for me to recover from that cardiac event. Then as I learned how to build Alexa Skills, I saw an opportunity to leverage one of those tools through the vocal interface of an Alexa Skill, and Healthy Text Scheduler was born. The potential for improving our lives through attaining and maintaining a healthy weight continues as we age, and that is the reason I feel Healthy Text Scheduler fits perfectly in the scope of this hackathon.