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Comment by cunninghamd | Hacker News Reader

But HOW do you track all that data? Today, with a smartphone, it seems easier, but even then I’d like something akin to a master spreadsheet that I can store it all in.

Seth: what format are you tracking all that data in?

Of course, now that I type that, I’m worried the answer is “pen and paper.”

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One of my someday projects to create a generic self tracking app that presents a dashboard for quick entry tracking and visualization and syncs with a website. It will also export to a spreadsheet. It will also allow you to visualize data with graphs and so on. There will be a bunch of presets for various special types of graphs, like with blood pressure and so on. You could also specify zones for numbers so you can show 'red' for a danger zone glucose level for example.

Managing spreadsheets on a smartphone is very kludgey.

That's basically a project I'm actively developing now - generic self-tracking (manual and via sensors and imported from other platforms), with presets and intuitive visualizations. This is a big gap in most tracking tools that are out there - letting you track anything you want, while also making sense of all the information in a useful way.

My motivation is to create something that's effective for sufferers of obscure chronic illnesses, since most tracking tools out there focus on major well-known illnesses, or simply aren't flexible enough to track weird symptoms that are so obscure that the developers have never heard of them. But the side-product is that the design will therefore be flexible enough to be useful for anyone who wants to track any element of their health.

Sounds really interesting, would you mind sending me an email? Im organizing the SF QS group and it'd be great to have you come and demo if you're local, and even if not we're looking for a tool to help us perform group QS tracking. My email is sina dot khanifar at gmail.

In one of the linked pages - http://quantifiedself.com/2012/07/nick-winter-a-lazy-mans-ap... he mentions quantifed mind, but I can't find any site with that name.

EDIT: Ooops, a little googling further reveals http://www.quantified-mind.com

After a little link-chasing I did get to a guide / tools page that may be useful: http://quantifiedself.com/guide/

To some people, it's not much better than "pen and paper", but I find org-mode in Emacs very handy. And yes, I've got it on my smartphone. I've not played with the Android or iPhone org-mode apps, but org-mode keeps everything in plain text, the tables export to CSV and TSV, plus there is already quick and dirty graphing built-in (org-plot/gnuplot).

As for more advanced stuff, I've started looking into statistically analyzing the data, also in org: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html

I find the smart-phone answers encouraging. I had never heard of the quantified self movement before, but it is a neat thing. However, just imagine the power for science when thousands and millions of self-reported health data are aggregated (hopefully anonymously). You could watch viruses spread geographically in real time. You could find "cancer hot spots" much faster. You could "see" genetic abnormalities propagate over generations.

https://zenobase.com/ is another, new self-tracking service. It's quite generic, so not as user-friendly or convenient as more specialized tracking services can be, but it's more flexible, and is an improvement over a plain spreadsheet (or pen and paper).

This is the one I use http://your.flowingdata.com/ You can send direct tweets so it's pretty handy to use from a phone

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