51–60 of 163 posts
Very beautiful animations and visualizations. What tools did you use to build them?
In general he has a few global objects which seem to contain everything for each section; ajax requests, animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) etc. Most of it is done via jQuery.
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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 experimen…
1) Saying "well, you could just find this information some other way" may be true but useless - everyone has different mechanisms that work well for them. If it takes a device or app or whatever for someone to stick with a change they want to make, then good for them.
2) While there is definitely some general health and fitness advice that would benefit most people, it's terribly naive to believe the story ends there. Population averages are just that, every person will also have specific mechanisms and effects that are important to their own wellbeing and not particularly generalizable.
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…
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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 experimen…
In my opinion you are missing two very key points. 1) Saying "well, you could just find this information some other way" may be true but useless - everyone has different mechanisms that work well for them. If it takes a device or app or whatever for someone to stick with a change they want to make, then good for them. 2) While there is definitely some general health and fitness advice that would benefit most people,…
1. It matters to me because I see this as a waste of resources (hardware, software, brains) for something that is near obvious. While it's anyone's choice to consume the way they want, I am just morally opposed to it.
2. What these apps address are general health/fitness metrics, in a very superficial manner. As I said, once we have more meaningful tracking I'll be onboard, for now these are rudimentary toys.
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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…
Nobody gets overweight overnight. You might not end up being 'overweight' if you know your certain eating habit will end up being bad for you ( everybody has a different metabolism rate ) so you cannot say eating xxxxx causes your friend to gain weight so will it you gain weight if you eat it out of moderation. All the data being collected individually and studied/analysed over time for 'you' is what could change.
Everything you say is right and approximations have been working good for everyone till now, but there is never harm to move from approximations and assumptions to absolute certainty about a few things we can measure ( now ).
This data could help you know when is the right time to test your blood maybe?
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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…
In order to correlate with heath issues your going to need a standard to work from. Which makes collecting most of this info before 'fit-bit 12.0' or whatever somewhat pointless. What exercise data can tell you is if your gaining or losing ground. So, if you do 10k in the same time but your heart rate is higher or lower that means something. But it's not going to correlate with a say a 1% increase of diabetes because…
Your data over a period of few months might make more sense to understand what ill-effects certain things have had on you. Think about 1 year's worth of your data being analysed to tell what certain things have had certain health related changes in you. Of course it still would take time to know how the changes you make will change things in you but based on your past data it could predict perhaps?
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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…
There is a lot of other data these apps collect other than just the calories you eat or burn. Of course almost everything is a approximation but better than zero data on anything. Nobody gets overweight overnight. You might not end up being 'overweight' if you know your certain eating habit will end up being bad for you ( everybody has a different metabolism rate ) so you cannot say eating xxxxx causes your friend to…
I don't agree that approximation are better than zero data; people are already self-diagnosing a lot, without the understanding that numbers, averages and science in that field are not as accurate as we'd like it to be. It takes a physician to accurately guess what may be good/wrong with you (and I mean guess).
Ultimately, I feel there's enough big, obvious metrics you can derive from your body without strapping a fitbit on.
??!!!
So nobody feel that tracking everything you do every second and log it in real time and forever on a server is terribly frightening ?!!!!
In 2005 i predicted every one who ever logged on facebook would regret it one day and pay a huge price for it. This is more than real now. Still you don't stop, and now you're sending to "them" in realtime your heartbeats, your weight, what you yeat, etc.
Did you just forgot about LIFE ? Is this the next American Way of life ? So yout think totalitarism is Iran or Syria ? Pouarrrk !!!
You guys are totally out of your minds. Seriously.