How to ask for Information from Another Professional Professionally?

Don Geronimo

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Aug 22, 2014
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I'm a little beyond my scope in a current app I'm working on. A single line to summarize what this app does right now: This application uses a combination of passive sensors (like a device's GPS and a Microsoft Band's BPM, GSR, and Skin Temperature) and active user check ins (for general emotional rating from 1-5 and specific emotions felt) to create a database of a person's range of emotions from the start of this app's lifetime to the end of this app's lifetime (i.e. the user stops using the app). It's not enough for me to justify this as an app (as it stands it's just yet another mood tracker) because I'd also want it to provide some actionable insights for the user to get the result of better managing emotions in hope to leading a more emotionally-fulfilling life.

What insights the application can provide, however, are where I'm stuck; the actual data collection is easy. "Simple" queries can already provide some insight (i.e. "What emotions have I felt near this location on Mondays from 3-6 PM?" or "How do I rate my day on average whenever I feel sad or angry?"), but I'm not sure what insights are valuable, or if there are other insights that are more pressing.

After thinking about it, the most efficient way of getting the information I need is to probably ask a professional who is more knowledgeable about emotions: is this data valuable, what insights could you make from it, what insights are valuable in an on-demand basis, what other insights could be gleamed from the data beyond what a simple database query could provide (perhaps algorithms?). However, I'm not exactly sure how to go about finding professionals who would be willing to talk with me, let alone how to ask them? A psychologist, after all, does this as a profession and should be compensated as such, but I'm not sure how to even ask a psychologist to help me out to form a useful application, not to mention I'm not sure how to even properly compensate for information that becomes truly useful. Plus, right now, I'm not sure what the financial resources I have to pay a psychologist what they're worth for an hour of talk.

So I guess I'm asking how do you approach a professional with an inquiry for knowledge that you don't have, and how do you give proper compensation?
 

Laura Knotek

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Mar 31, 2012
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Hi Don,

I've moved your thread to the Developers Corner forum, since you will probably get more help from fellow developers rather than regular members.

Good luck with your app development.

Sent from my rooted Nexus 7 (2013) using Tapatalk
 

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