I've been tracking everything about myself
aprilzero.com
aprilzero.com
He's using d3, jQuery, mapbox, jquery-pjax
Lot's of analytics (NewRelic, gaug.es, segment.io)
Skillwise you'd need great js, great d3, eye for design, patience to layout a million state transitions and animate them all with css + js, wiring up a million data sources & api's, jquery, ajax, pushstate, and pretty legit backend skills to keep this thing running ATM.
• Running Django on Heroku • Coffeescript, jQuery • SASS • A lot of webkit transitions & some animations • A souped up version of pjax for loading pages • Getting the data from APIs from Moves, Runkeeper, Withings, Foursquare, Github, Instagram, etc. • The run maps are a set of coordinates passed to Mapbox to make the map tiles & Leaflet for creating the SVG line. • D3 has really nice geo stuff, I use their mercator projection to convert lat/longs to points on the map of the world
The site is slightly unresponsive, but this is probably due to all the traffic HN is generating. OP should consider adding loading animations, it would make the transitions more fluid in such a busy time.
- Your height. To calculate your BMI and contrast it with your Body Fat %. To be a runner, your BF% is high, but I cannot see whether it is because lack of muscle ("skinny fat") or excess of body fat. As you are not logging any weight training session, my guess is the former, but I am sure you are not logging all these data to end up guessing :)
- Triglycerides: I find this much more important than LDL/HDL. It as a proxy for excess carb (either you are eating too many of them, or you are exercising too little). Remember, triglycerides are produced in the liver from any excess carbohydrates that have not been used for energy. They have nothing to do with dietary fats.
- Total cholesterol. To be able to calculate the TC to HDL ratio.
- LDL/HDL ratio. With you current stats it is at 1,5 (average risk), but it should be handy to see it in the dashboard.
My suggestions:
- Do some weight training. If you goal is to be healthy, this is key. A couple of 30 mins heavy sessions per week will do it. No need to become a gym rat.
- Eat better.
- I see that you are running outdoors, but your D3 levels are mid-low. I guess you are running either too early in the morning or too late in the evening. Try to get some running with the sun right above your head (just bring more water with you)
Congrats for this herculean effort.
Ignorant and sincere question: Why?
- It allows fast glucose clearance from blood via both insulin and non-insulin glucose transport.
- It drives bone density by pure mechanical tension. More muscle = stronger bones/tendons to support them. The usual hip fracture/high mortality we see in elderly people follows the loss of muscle mass->loss of bone strength->bone breaks->fall pathway, not the more intuitive fall->bone break.
- It serves as "organ reserve". In case of injury or disease, your muscle mass will literally keep you alive. There are some interesting studies about muscle mass on admission to the ICU and mortality/morbidity. This is the extreme case, but you get the picture.
- Not per-se, but the neurological effort you put in your weight training sessions drive the secretion of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF improves existing neurons signaling and promotes the creation of new ones. As a side note, I have seen a huge improvement in my - properly diagnosed - ADHD child after putting him in a functional "lift heavy shit" exercise program.
Running is well documented in its role in improving bone density: http://healthfully.org/highinterestmedical/id33.html
Unlike weight-lifting there are actual studies showing running promoting neurogenesis (the increase of brain cells) and improving performance: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Finally, muscle mass is far from enough to be an effective metabolic regulator. While I have yet to meet anyone who runs 100 miles a week and is overweight, it's not uncommon to find that someone who benches 500lbs still carries a gut. I myself have gained a great deal of both fat and muscle since my school years when I was a runner.
I think weight-lifting does some great things depending on one's aesthetic goals, and it's probably the most time efficient way to increase bone density. It's hardly the optimal exercise for general health, though. There are many aspects of health, ranging from neurogenesis to heart health to immune system function to maintaining telomere length that cardio most helps.
This is not about weight lifting vs running. Anand is already running and I suggested him to add some weight training to gain some lean mass, as his BF level (19%) is a little high, possibly due to the lack of muscle mass.
For the record, I run - or bike - at least twice per week.
More likely is that the OP just isn't doing enough. Running 25 miles a week is enough to bring about significant benefits in health and fitness along with moderate weight control benefits. 25 miles a month is just a waste. Going up from 1-2x per week to 3-4x makes a huge difference.
Most likely is that it's a dietary issue. While living in Asia, I knew many, many non-exercising people at healthy weight levels just because they didn't overeat like Americans tend to. The OP probably doesn't eat like them.
- I am not against running, but I consider weight lifting a necessary addition to it.
- I am not talking about lowering body fat or aesthetics. I am talking about health. A lower body fat is healthier up to a point. Single digit body fat level is just an unhealthy as a 30% body fat level.
- In the same sense, this is not about how much calories muscles burn as this is irrelevant to health. My point is about the role muscle has in maintaining homeostasis in our metabolism.
- My point is/was to help Anand: My sweet spot for body fat level is 13-14%. This is where I feel and perform the best. Anand is at 19% and I believe it is because lack of lean mass; that´s why I recommended him some weight lifting.
[citation needed]
>Anand is at 19% and I believe it is because lack of lean mass; that´s why I recommended him some weight lifting.
My point was that this belief doesn't make sense. Some people who lift and have a lot of muscle mass are lean, but many others aren't. A billion people who don't body-build are leaner than the OP. An objective observation of people (or even countries of people) who are or aren't fat doesn't generate very convincing evidence for the theory that people are fat "because of a lack of lean mass". It's because of their diets.
On the contrary it tends to be exactly those groups most interested in weight training who are the fattest— e.g. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Anglophones in general.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Health/Obesit...
1. Take an equal amount of fat vs muscle: which will burn more calories? Muscle, obviously. 2. People who bench 500lbs are not that common, and those that are are probably power-lifters, not body-builders. There's a big difference. Power-lifters are more apt to gain 'dirty weight' (meaning fat included with the muscle) to help them drive ever-higher PRs.
What I was saying was that merely building muscle doesn't do much in terms of cutting down body fat. Muscle burns calories, but people with more muscle also tend to eat more calories. This is even true of people who have extraordinary quantities of muscle.
Cardio, on the other hand, only works that way up to a point. People who do a bit of running also tend to compensate by eating more. However, after a certain level of volume, cardio starts to suppress the appetite to about what's needed to maintain the workload. This is probably why I've never seen anyone, including myself, manage to keep the weight on after getting over about 70 miles/week (about the level of an ambitious high school cross-country runner).
So say you're kinda frail at age 25, and everyone agrees you lose about half your muscle mass by age 75. Half of frail at 75 might be a very big problem. If you want to be healthy at age 75, in contrast to merely being alive, that would have certain implications for your goals at age 25, or 50, or 70 or whatever.
Or the TLDR is many (not all) of the health benefits of weight training show up later in life not in your youth.
Superficially, I never broke any bones in my 20s or 30s so weight training might be seen as a waste of time, but the "real" benefit of weight training is I'm much less likely to break a hip at 75. Better balance, better coordination, more muscle mass so I have to risk less, denser bones, stronger ligaments... Aside from not having a broken hip at 75, just in day to day life I'm likely to feel a heck of a lot better.
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, similarly I would see myself trying to improve my sleep patterns. But really, so far, people I've met use this as yet another distraction.
I have yet to meet anybody who has been leveraging the data they collect; most (all?) people I know eat healthy, exercise and sleep well do so without relying on devices. Now, once we're able to track real health related data continuously, we may be able to detect illness or problems as soon as they arise and effectively create a feedback lookp. But from where I stand, as of today, these things are just gimmicks.
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 thinking it helped me fall asleep more quickly but using the app for a week I was able to prove that false. Obviously my data set it very small but the changes seem to be working.
If you collect data on lots of different things all of these small changes/improvements you make could add up to a noticeable difference in quality of life. The holy grail of course is software that can analyse all of these data points and recommend changes.
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.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirst#Elderly
You pretty much have to tell old people to drink, after they're too old to know they need to drink.
Its also "semi well known" that cold weather tends to mask thirst symptoms, and the resulting dehydration doesn't help much WRT hypothermia prevention, so this claim is, again, not people in general, but the subset of people in an environment colder than they're used to.
Beyond those two metrics I can't think of anything it'd be useful to check regularly. Reflex time or achilles reflex test might be good.
I'm just assuming that you are within the average age group of hacker news readers (somewhere between 20 and 40 years) it's not really recommended for you to be above 75bpm.
The idea that a lower pulse rate is better comes from the observation that endurance athletes have low resting pulse rates, and it is generally assumed that endurance exercise is healthy. The truth is that high volume exercise suppresses the metabolism and compromises health.
Here's a counter-claim: "A normal resting heart rate for adults ranges from 60 to 100 beats a minute.
Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness. For example, a well-trained athlete might have a normal resting heart rate closer to 40 beats a minute."
Source: Mayo Clinic, http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/expert-answ...
Sprinters and strength athletes do no get a suppressed heart rate. It's only endurance athletes and others who train high volume.
This is well understood by a lot of trainers. Low pulse and low body temperature in the morning is an easy way to measure over-training.
People need to get it through their heads that highly trained "fit" athletes are not very healthy, as a general rule. They tend to develop problems relatively young. Marathon running is worst of all, each marathon run showing a statistical reduction in life span.
- Exercise more, - Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...), - Sleep more, - Drink less.
*/
And as an insomniac I was having trouble with 'sleep more'. People with worse insomnia than me have to go sleep clinics to work out how to improve their situation. Mine wasn't bad enough to warrant that but fortunately there was an app to allow me to do a little of my own research. Without it I wouldn't be able to tell the time it took me to fall asleep - as I would be asleep.
Podcasts and music don't require screens, though, so I don't see why you're assuming that was the problem.
Google does not interpolate those suggestions from your personal data, that's where the fitbit etc. apps shine.
- Having a glass of water - Going for a short walk - Having a glass of wine - Watching a movie/tv show with your partner - Telling a bedtime story to your kids - Washing the dishes while thinking about your day - Talking to your mum/dad/bro/sis - listening to some calming music - having a shower
How would you know what contributed to your good night sleep?
Having an app/tool tracking these for you and telling you that your best sleep is when you do A C and F not E or G is very valuable.
If you are smart enough to track and figure it out, then heck, I think you have too much free time or you are highly intuitive of yourself
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 stay healthy which you messed up a day before? For example, people who work out a lot and live on a diet, might some day indulge in something without really wanting to and all this data could tell how much ( theoretically ) will affect your health so what you should do today to make up for yesterday (?).
Think about this on much broader aspect, too much of something eventually is bad. Nobody is going to tell you forever to stop something until you stop, apps like this could gather data and at the end of a week/month/quarter could tell you your score and could rather calculate the risk of xxxx disease/illness which could happen because of your bad eating habits.
All this data could be synced with your medical file/with your doctor in order to keep tabs on your health and push personalised notifications of what and what not to do or just be cautious/warning.
I don't know if such thing really already exists or possible or even good but all this data could be tapped in and used much better way.
Oh and no clue why all this data should be social or public. IMO, it should be private and shared within family/concerned people.
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 we just don't run studies with that much detail yet.
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?
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.
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?
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.
>...But still gathering all this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later....
Also, Physicians do not accurately take the data. They ultimately diagnose/analyse the data they get from tests/devices/you.
You should read my earlier replies keep in mind that nobody here said that the data could be used to STOP going to doctors, it would rather help us skip a few visits but ultimately of course if something tells you, you are going to be sick ( gadget or sixth sense ) you'll need to go to your medical practitioner. Doctors and hospitals can never be replaced.
Keeping yourself healthy is different from falling sick.
When I started seriously lifting, I collected some bench marks. I collected my one rep max, six rep max and ten rep max in four different exercises. Then, I collected data on my pulse rate after doing a ten rep set in various exercises.
When I work out, I collect what exercises I performed, how many sets/reps, and what kinds of weight I lifted. And, I intended to check my benchmarks once a month, but in practice it has worked out to be closer to every six weeks.
Roughly nine months later and collecting that data has proven very beneficial. For example, with strength training it is too easy to get into a routine and then keep banging out that same routine every day. I always know what I did the last time I worked a muscle group, so I feel intense pressure from myself to either move a few more pounds, bang out another set, or add a few more reps to a set. And, I get to track how various lifestyle changes interact with strengh training.
For example, in December, I broke my right thumb cross country skiing and had to take some time off lifting. Weirdly, the time off actually increased my bench and shoulder presses because I was using my left (non-dominant) side significantly more often. Balancing my right and left sides made me significantly stronger.
Or, in May, the snow was gone so I started jogging again. Jogging improved some aspects of my lifting - for example, my heart rate after a set has dropped since I added in jogging. But, it has also hurt other aspects - for example, my gains in strength are actually slowing. Incidentally, monitoring my jogging showed me that my tendency to settle into a routine carries across into other forms of exercise. I realized that I was running the same route every single time in roughly the exact same amount of time. My body got used to a level of effort and then stopped getting better.
Just because the 'people you have met' use this as a distraction does not mean that everyone will. And, just because all the people you know eat well and exercise regularly, it doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people find that the simple act of tracking their performance keeps them motivated to continuously improve. Others have goals beyond 'be healthy' and need to monitor their progress if they have any hope of reaching their goals.
This is the trifecta of slow—consistently low mileage, no hills and running at the same speed every workout.
Things like climbing (which I also do) don't have automatic trackers, and tracking food intake is just too cumbersome these days for me to even try and keep up with that.
If there were better ways to automate these things and better APIs available to pull these things in automatically, I'd totally build something like this. I just don't have the time, inclination, or the energy to manually add the climbs, the calories, every food item, and myriad other things into the system.
So I'll say this: it's beautiful and full of very, very cool info. I just wouldn't do it myself unless I could generate all of that data. A handful of commits to build the site, and then let it update itself automatically via APIs. Granted, this means my site would be a bit less interesting, since the most interesting things on here are things you can't automatically track... but I'm working on plenty of other interesting things, and this just doesn't rate high enough on my list to do.
I'm jealous, though. Very well done.
Food intake, water intake, caffeine intake, many forms of exercise, and even the work you do daily (depending on job) aren't easy to track. Jawbone UP have a nice caffeine app that is useful if you remember to use it. I've heard of water bottles which register the movement of a sip. I still haven't found a food tracker that works for me - MyFitnessPal is the universally acclaimed one but I loathe it. Taking photos of one's food is a simple enough proxy if you aren't interested in the overall nutritional composition but more the qualitative part (and you can actually outsource and - to a small extent - automate nutritional tagging from photos). But yes, we are a long way away from being able to let much of this data be tracked automatically.
I think the important part is to figure out what questions you want to ask, if you aren't dedicated to tracking for its own sake. Are you having trouble focusing in the afternoon? Do you want to figure out if your sleep is a factor? Track your sleep religiously and go from there.
I ask because I have a lot of unformed questions and thoughts about what is known as the 'quantified self' movement. Given the technological memory of all these things, what insights or changes do you draw/make?
What I am wondering, though is: how are the vitamin/mineral stats on http://aprilzero.com/sport/ generated? Is there a way to self-measure these stats without blood tests?
The blood levels are coming from a standard blood test, available at any doctor's office. I've been getting them about once a month.
You need to fast for at least 8 hours prior to get accurate results, and it takes about 2 vials of blood. I'm waiting for some sort of device to give you realtime values with just a prick of blood or constant monitoring.
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?
I would be interested in a turnkey solution with modular components that would allow people to quickly "snap" together a site like this.
BTW, anyone knows why it is Nicholas Felton and feltron.com? (with and without "r")?
For the last month, I've been tracking what I eat with MyFitnessPal, and have been tracking my weight every morning with a Withings wifi scale. It's extremely powerful when the data is collected effortlessly, and for the first time in my life, I'm on track to really change some unhealthy habits. Entering food in MFP is still a PITA, but I've managed to keep it up so far.
It's been one of my dream projects to design a personal dashboard like this, especially in the style of the Iron Man movies. This website has exceeded everything I imagined. I hope it becomes open source one day, and that I can contribute a ton of new integrations and sections. Or if not, please let me pay to use this service!
[1]: https://tictrac.com
It's a genuine question--I basically NEVER stay in hotels beyond the required sleep time, so I'm curious as to how other people do things.
Also many places have a lot of nice facilities that might still count as being at the location like restaurants, bars, rooftops, pools, beaches, gym, etc.
All of this stuff is fixed on pacific time, even when halfway across the world. So in Asia, the middle of the day will show boring sleep at the hotel, and the actual activity gets split up at the beginning and ends of the timeline.
Not ideal but I haven't figured out a good solution for that yet.
What I really like about Moves is how comprehensive it is — it has every single place you went to rather than just ones that you thought were worth checking into, etc. What turns out to be relevant or helpful data to have is hard to know except in hindsight.
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.
I agree but recently I read that doctors tend to completely discount this type of data provided by a patient as they can't verify it's accuracy (did the patient collect the data correctly) and it would be risky to base their diagnosis on it.
Even if that is the case I think it can be very useful for people with chronic conditions. They can find out ways to minimise their pain through this kind of tracking/trial and error which a doctor would never have the time to do.
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.
So that's why people were calling it pretty. It does actually look good with all that prefix nonsense fixed.
Seems odd to use prefixes for things that were unprefixed 2years ago in Firefox.
I won't go so far as to say stop using prefixes, but ALWAYS include the unprefixed version last in the CSS stack. It's so easy with Sass also.
Why do I care to document where I went or which rock I climbed. Has narcissism finally become socially acceptable?
The screencasts at https://www.youtube.com/user/zenobase should give you an idea of what you can do with Zenobase; if all you need is a nice dashboard showing recent data, there are simpler solutions like TicTrac.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/using-sensors-to-track-your-e...
PS. The website is well done, but in all fairness, similar websites were made in Flash more than 10 years ago.
??!!!
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.
This is beautiful, voluntary and insightful.
Dave Eggers novel _The Circle_ looks at this, and while I felt it was hyperbolic and more than a little preachy, it's certainly worth thinking about.
Oh my god, how old are you all ? Are you the next generation of this world ? Don't you just understand you behave like products and not human !? This is possibly the end of the world.
One will have to kill me before seeing me wearing a tracking device.
Are you saying you don't carry a cellphone? How has that decision impacted your daily life?
I just can't understand you can't see any danger for the future the way things are moving. We need to stop all this data collection on people. This data is being used already, for commercial matters and as a matter of fact for spying and mind control. One have to be nut to yell "conspiracy theory" when the fact is spreaded all over the news. Just go for curiosity on Wikileaks or Snowden files, just be curious. I'm not american and i'm not native english speaking, broader you vision.
Your point might be better expressed with correct spelling and punctuation.
I'm not american and I'm not native english speaking, broader you vision a bit please, you understood my point, how many languages should I speak and write fluently to have your attention ? Oh and how many ones do YOU speak and write fluently ?