This program is a hardware monitoring program. It's purpose is to protect your precious hardware from system failure. For this purpose it makes use of a very useful feature most modern mainboards have built in. This feature is an integrated hardware monitoring chip. The most famous one is probably the LM78 by National Semiconductors, but there are a variety of other manufacturers building similar chips with the same or even extended capabilities. These chips monitor, depending on their implementation, your board's fan speeds, temperatures, voltages and other things like chassis intrusion and so on.
If your mainboard has such a chip, it is very probable that some sort of protection is built into your BIOS. However, usually this protection is limited to monitoring one sensor, such as the CPU or system temperature. It rings the alarm if this single monitored value gets too high. However, if you are absent, this won't help much, for obvious reasons. Additionally, such an implementation won't show you the current state of all sensors if your system is up and running, but only when you are currently changing your BIOS settings.
This is where KHealthCare comes in. It will show you the actual values of all sensors ( at least of those values implemented in the program, which are quite a couple ), lets you set the limits you consider critical for all sensors, and rings the alarm bells if any sensor's value leaves the mormal range. In this case, it will also notify you with message boxes, in case your system speaker does not work. If you don't react to those message boxes - possibly because you are absent - and if you have configured KHealthCare to behave this way, it will shut down your computer, so that no major hardware damage can occur. This is especially useful for systems working unattended, such as server systems.
From version 0.2 on, KHealthCare utilizes the lm_sensors library, which has been created for doing the communication with hardware monitoring chips, and will become a part of the Linux kernel in the future. It supports a variety of chips, which will all be added to future versions of this software. For the time being, Winbond w8378x chips, the LM series, SiS5595 and adm9240 compatible chips are supported.
v0.1, Aug 99: Initial release v0.2, Sep 99: Added two displays: second CPU core voltage and VID Switched to the lm_sensors library, which introduces much wider hardware support for this software now supported: w83781d, w83782d, w83783s, LM75, LM78, LM79, LM79-J, LM80 v0.3, Sep 99: new features: dynamic gui generation, depending on detected chip features sensors detecting critical conditions change color added support for SiS5595, adm9240, ds1780 and LM81 bug fixes: made message boxes modeless: if multiple failures are detected at the same time, no message boxes are suppressed any more bugfix in .kdelnk file: khealthcare won't consider itself the default application for executables any longer v0.3.1, Oct 99: made chip identify message only appear if the program is not restored by the session manager added support for Genesys Logic GL518SM and GL520SM