A Visual Real-Time Mobile E-Logbook System to Capture Design Activities, Decisions, and Ideas for Engineers

Logbook is one of the important tools to engineers, which is used to capture engineers’ design activities, decisions, and ideas. It is useful to engineers in accomplishing project designs, organising, tracking, and providing post-design evaluation. However, the lack of digitalization of logbooks had made the engineers’ design activities heavily dependent on human intervention. Therefore, this research work explores the potential of digitalization of logbooks by redesigning and developing the paper-based logbook into a visual real-time mobile application. The focus of the developed visual e-logbook is to move the old-fashioned way of capturing design activities and decisions into a more systematic and effective way which allows engineers to capture and access logs at any point of time. The visual e-logbook application uses Swift programming language, SwiftUI framework and XCode as the main Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The implemented visual e-logbook is then tested with case studies and results show that the visual e-logbook has good potential for engineering design projects by replacing the paper logbook. Feedback is thus collected from the case studies for future implementation such as search and filtering function, enable collaboration, and reminder function.