Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#81

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 7:43 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #2

Serious questions: Why do you try to track it? Do you want to track it? I don't know anything more about your condition than a few sentences from Google. So I don't know if tracking would or would not provide useful information for making daily choices that mitigate symptom or if tracking would have substantial on medical treatment outcomes. And most importantly, I don't know if tracking will or won't benefit your me…

Well really im trying to see if anything triggers it, and if it does, I stop the trigger. Maybe something about my food, or how much I sleep, or if I drink caffeine or not is causing some of the pain Im having. But I dont know.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#82

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 7:48 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #28

What do you need to track? I have a personal app I call Genomicly where I am, quite amateurishly, trying to replicate MaxGen panel and similar precision medicine with whoop, and LabCorp integration. My main goal is privacy which is tricky without the right hardware. The whoop is really easy to use from someone with ADHD and 20 years on a fire engine. I need simple.

what do you mean by (My main goal is privacy which is tricky without the right hardware)?

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#83

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

heikkilevanto wrote: post #45

I keep an old phone in the bathroom, and every morning I use it to file my weight and my peak flow (for asthma tracking) on a web page I host on my home server. The server just appends the numbers into two text files, and plots some nice curves. In case of errors or other problems, I can just go and edit those files. The basic tracker took about an afternoon to code, by hand, long before we had LLMs. I have a more ad…

Did your friends ever say why they stopped, or did they just kind of stop opening it? For me it was always the second one. I never really decided to quit any of mine, I just noticed a few weeks later that I had.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#84

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #31

Reducing friction is what worked for me. I've been using a headache tracking app for a few months now. I had to sort through a bunch of bad apps. Eventually I settled on one that only requires three taps to log symptoms after it sends a notification once a day (the key is you can set custom buttons to record the specific info you want). That's low enough overhead that I stick with it, and because of that I actually d…

Im definetly checking this out! Thanks for linking it!

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#85

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #5

I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it. There were two key insights for me: - too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it - always being reminded about s…

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Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#86

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

atombender wrote: post #49

jimnotgym wrote: post #21

The bigger question you should ask yourself, is what are you hoping to gain by tracking? I mean if you were getting results from Google sheets you would be using it today. If you want to make it a product you need to do it in a way that makes people less paranoid, allows them to enjoy their life, doesn't try to guilt or game them into staying involved, doesn't have, lots of notifications and makes their life better a…

Those are good questions, and to answer them you really have to think about what it is to have an illness that requires treatment. Typically you start on a medication. These usually take anywhere from 3 to 6 months to really work. Along the way you will have ups and downs, and maybe some unexpected new things happening that are related to the disease. Do you feel better today than 3, 4, 5 months ago? Are you having m…

Ya this is 100% exactly where Im coming from. Probably word for word. Im on my 6th med right now, and just thinking about how long the journey is/was and what lays ahead is why Im trying to build something for this.

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#87

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #46

A few decades ago I was diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure) and for about the last 15 years I have been tracking my blood pressure and weight. Every morning when I wake up, I weigh myself and take my blood pressure. I write the results in a CSV file that sits on my desktop (it gets backed up). I do this religiously, every single day. I have tried other, more "modern", solutions but somehow they don't st…

Hopefully something I can solve with what Im building. Thank you for the perspective!

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#88

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

FranklinMaillot wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what you want to track but I'd recommend becoming a stationary nerd . Experiment with different notebooks, paper quality, try fountain pens, pencils, pastels... Pick the combination that brings you joy. If you find pleasure in the tactile act of putting ink (or graphite) on paper, you'll never want to quit journaling. Believe me. I'm only half joking. Physical, handmade artefacts beat everything else, an…

Haha, I love this. I went to Seattle recently and went to a stationary store. I bought a 150 dollar pen (yikes!). But oh my god, writing with it brings me so much pleasure. (I felt the same thing after moving from a 20 dollar Logitech keyboard to a 110 dollar lofree, it brings so much joy to use a excellent tool)

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#89

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #22

FranklinMaillot wrote: post #14

I'm not sure what you want to track but I'd recommend becoming a stationary nerd . Experiment with different notebooks, paper quality, try fountain pens, pencils, pastels... Pick the combination that brings you joy. If you find pleasure in the tactile act of putting ink (or graphite) on paper, you'll never want to quit journaling. Believe me. I'm only half joking. Physical, handmade artefacts beat everything else, an…

I have to agree. At my gym, the people who seem to track their training mostly use paper notebooks. Even the younger people who otherwise live on their phones or post instagram videos of all their lifts. I don't notice many people using apps. Though it can be hard to tell, because e.g. a smart watch may be tracking some things automatically, or an app may have computed the workout in advance. I personally don't track…

Funny you say that. I tried tracking with a journal for 2 months, and it was just cumbersome to add it to the things I bring to gym (water bottle, earphones, wallet and phone). I eventually gave up in remembering to bring it, and just went back to logging on my phone

Re: Ask HN: I've quit six systems for tracking my illness. What works?

#90

Post by Abh1Works » Thu, Aug 20, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

placidpanda wrote: post #44

Moving into the "physical world" helped me immensely. * A paper calendar (ideally the kind with boxes for each day) * Prompts inside the boxes if relevant, like for pill 1, pill 2, pill 3 * Dedicated physical space, with the associated stuff you need all together (including a pen/pencil!), somewhere that you will see it as part of your normal day to day I also use phone reminders or spreadsheets for long term trackin…

Yes actually! I recently bough a very expensive pen and kind of guilt me into writing and using physical media. I haven't really solved the problem of analyzing this data though (Ive tried scanning but stopped because its kind of alot of effort).