I've been tracking everything about myself • Hacker News Board

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#41

Post by hawkharris » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started.

It's also smart to record the data yourself instead of sharing it with a health tracking app. With due respect to those projects, I draw a line at sharing specific and private health information. I've arrived at this personal stance after weighing the benefits of information sharing against the risks of my data being leaked, mishandled or mined.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#42

Post by alanthonyc » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:05 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #34

hunvreus wrote: post #33

Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation. I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day. I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it,…

I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster. Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinki…

Which app do you use, may I ask?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#43

Post by afaqurk » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

Anand, you beautiful, brilliant bastard. That site looks awesome beyond compare. Awesome job.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#44

Post by mirashii » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:12 PM UTC

Jemaclus wrote: post #36

I like it. My big beef with it so far is that it looks like most of this stuff is input manually by Anand. (The 1200+ commits suggests that it's manual and not automatic.) I'm not anal enough to spend that kinda time tracking things. I have a Fitbit, a scale that i step on every day, Strava to track my runs, etc, but those are all things you just put on (or push a button) and forget about. Things like climbing (which…

For what it's worth, having worked with Anand, I don't think 1200+ commits suggests it's input manually (you can see on the about page a list of some of the APIs it's pulling data from), I think it more suggests that Anand likes to commit a lot when he's building something. And for good reason, it's been really cool to check out historical revisions and see how a design changed at every step.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#45

Post by vova_feldman » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:14 PM UTC

This is insane! Amazing work dude. Btw. love the UI/UX.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#46

Post by fuzzythinker » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:27 PM UTC

Very beautiful animations and visualizations. What tools did you use to build them?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#47

Post by gress » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

hboon wrote: post #24

djtriptych wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Felton's other site - daytum.com. It's an app and website that helps people get started, though the fancy visualizations aren't modularized just yet.

And http://www.reporter-app.com , an iOS app, also by Felton. BTW, anyone knows why it is Nicholas Felton and feltron.com? (with and without "r")?

'Tron' as a suffix suggests electronic or mechanized.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#48

Post by hunvreus » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #34

hunvreus wrote: post #33

Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation. I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day. I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it,…

I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster. Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinki…

IMHO, you don't need personalized data for this kind of stuff.

More seriously, there's plenty of literature out there about these things; spend 5 minutes on Google and you'll find all of these recommendations. You'll know that exercising will help you sleep. You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns. These are becoming common sense and shouldn't require you to run you own little experiment to figure it out.

If you want to improve the quality of your life, I doubt a fitbit will help you. You already know what you should be doing starting with the obvious ones:

- Exercise more,

- Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...),

- Sleep more,

- Drink less.

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#49

Post by gress » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:38 PM UTC

This is an astonishingly beautiful website, and clearly shows the technical and design skill of Anand.

However, I'm genuinely not sure what the purpose of this dashboard is other than as a résumé piece. What questions does it answer? How is it better than doing specific investigations using R?

Re: I've been tracking everything about myself

#50

Post by hunvreus » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

vidyesh wrote: post #38

hunvreus wrote: post #33

Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation. I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day. I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it,…

You are right. From what I see apart from use for sports professionals or people for whom physical health matters too much ( livelihood ) they would make use of it the most. But still gathering al this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later somebody will figure out how to use the data so well that it could ( algorithm / AI ) could determine what you should do today to reach a certain goal to st…

Do you really need an app to tell you you're not eating healthy? Nutrition and exercise aren't that hard; your body is able to let you know fairly easily when you're messing up, if not immediately at least over time. I have a very hard time believing that tracking your calories is going to significantly change your diet in the long term.

If you're overweight, you don't need to check on your smart-watch to know it. If you're drinking too much, you probably know about it already. And if you refuse to recognize it, I'm not sure numbers will help you. You don't need an AI to see that if you're 5 times a week at the pub for an average of 2 hours, you may have a problem.

There seems to be a strong belief that these things are hard to evaluate on your own, that the body is something mystical that can't seem to have any obvious logic. Yet we refuse to listen to the very basic, and reliable, signals our bodies broadcast.

Now if you're diabetic, or developing an illness, having a silent device continuously testing your blood would help. But we're far from it.