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Ask HN: I want to create a personal health dashboard, what should I use?

• 0zemp3c 3y ago
  smartwatches can measure a lot automatically most medical practices have your test results available online not sure why/how you need to merge blood tests and watch data for a meaningful benefit otherwise, spend time cleaning up your diet and improving your exercise and sleep...you can't get healthy just moving data around
  • pell 3y ago
    >otherwise, spend time cleaning up your diet and improving your exercise and sleep...you can't get healthy just moving data around Thanks for the suggestions, however what I'm asking for here is not so much about a data-driven shortcut to "getting healthy" but a way to track specific metrics. The data is scattered around different places and I mainly want it in one place so I can have a quick overview of the numbers, spot trends and make associations where needed.
    • 0zemp3c 3y ago
      Excel
      • digging 3y ago
        > So far I've been putting everything in an Excel sheet but I'm not a big fan of Excel and would like something standalone that might also show me progressions and changes more easily.
• mattbrewsbytes 3y ago
  The LoseIt app has goal tracking, mostly for weight loss, but also has a blood pressure, blood glucose and body measurements, nutrition, exercise and of course calorie tracking with a lot of food data. It syncs with Apple watch for exercise and does some calorie computation based on that. As you lose weight it also re-computes your daily calorie goal. It has charts and keeps history. It doesn't appear you can add random things to track as a goal and chart them but there are notes which might be more appropriate for cholesterol and blood test results since those are infrequent I assume.
  • pell 3y ago
    That's interesting, thank you! It seems very weight loss oriented as you said, which is not really what I'm looking for, however I'll check the notes feature you mentioned.
• beardyw 3y ago
  I doubt you will find anything which does just what you want. I created a Google form in 2020 which sends data into sheets where I have some routines to analyse it. Still going and works well.
• jmduke 3y ago
  You might find https://howisfelix.today/ https://howisfelix.today/? interesting, as both inspiration/prior-art/cautionary tale.
  • greenie_beans 3y ago
    this site gives me anxiety
  • chetangoti 3y ago
    This is brilliant work, thanks for sharing. I'm amazed by the dedication Felix has put to even log the manual data points everyday.
  • ragebol 3y ago
    Wow, that is very detailed!
• btseytlin 3y ago
  Disclaimer: Engineer for the app... If you're an engineer and interested in building a little application then read on! CommonHealth is a (free, non profit) app that patients can use to download their health data from their health care providers. We're all about open interoperability with the ability to for developers to build on top of the app using the SDK to ingest the data of a patient and build any visualizations/analytics etc. There's zero backend data aggregation, all data lives ONLY on your personal device once you download it from your health provider, and all data is thus deleted if you simply uninstall the app. So that's to say, if you're in the US market and want to build your own functionality, you definitely have that opportunity, as we've done the work connecting to 1000s of providers (with 100k+ coming by end of year) Reach out if you want to get started here https://www.commonhealth.org/developers#dev-link-4 https://www.commonhealth.org/developers#dev-link-4
  • ambicapter 3y ago
    Is this an Android-only application?
    • btseytlin 3y ago
      As mentioned in the other comment, yes this is Android only as there is an Apple offering (via HealthKit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit)!
  • vladsanchez 3y ago
    +1 about Android SDK. What about publishing an API? It's the most sensible and open way of attracting (ALL) developers not just Android ones.
    • btseytlin 3y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean about a publishing API but on the Apple side, there's Apple HealthKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit) and we're the Android version of their offering! In the spirit of being privacy-centric, individual mobile phones storing personal health data of that patient offline is key to this approach. So no web option (i.e. no databases storing mass data).
• bmikaili 3y ago
  Apple health
  • voisin 3y ago
    I concur. It isn’t as flexible but it is secure and you know it won’t get discontinued due to the company’s commitment (via Watch) to health and fitness, or convert to a SaaS model.
• vladsanchez 3y ago
  A combination of Grafana, a custom API and integration with Excel and HealthKit would be my choices. I concur that fragmentation kills our ability to custom-build these tools. I'm in the same position, I want to gather and have a single glass pane view of my meds, glucose, A1C, Weight, Exercise, Doctor Visits/Notes and Lab results. I'll jot this down on my PARA inbox. ;)
  • desro 3y ago
    I've successfully used this code to get my Health data into grafana for a sort of MVP recently https://github.com/k0rventen/apple-health-grafana https://github.com/k0rventen/apple-health-grafana
• collin128 3y ago
  Maybe Airtable? I worked on something in the space and one of the challenges we ran into was pulling data from Apple Health. At the time there was no API (haven't checked recently) so if we wanted that data we would have needed to build an app. There were companies that had apps/APIs but the price seemed to start at $30k which didn't make sense for us. Context: we were mostly focused on activity metrics.
• mrassili 3y ago
  I might be able to help just out of curiosity and interest. Reach out at hi at mrassili dot com and let’s talk
• bcopa 3y ago
  No connection to the app but you should check out https://www.humanity.health/ https://www.humanity.health/
• liampulles 3y ago
  Maybe sqlite - easy to transfer what you have and you can have a doc handy for doing nice queries. Once you figure out core functions you can facilitate interaction more with a UI or CLI, and some polling functions for remote data.
• Solvency 3y ago
  There used to be this: https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d24 https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d2... Which he then turned into this: https://gyrosco.pe/home/ https://gyrosco.pe/home/
• Onavo 3y ago
  Here, this was asked a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36025977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36025977
• glutamate 3y ago
  Shameless plug for Saltcorn (https://saltcorn.com https://saltcorn.com), which is the simplest and open sourciest way of creating a database web application for when you want an upgrade from Excel to proper tables with fields and relationships. Data viz, pivot table plugins available.
• Insalgo 3y ago
  Shameless plug: my.aidlab.com. It is free unless you want to store raw data of ecg/chest movements.
• runjake 3y ago
  I just use the iOS Health app to do all that. It's too much work to duplicate that into another system, IMHO. I even jam additional info like mood, weight, and blood pressure and other metrics into it with Shortcuts, which speeds up the process.
  • KMnO4 3y ago
    Shortcuts are great for this actually. You automatically get: - A Home Screen icon - Siri support - Ability to run on a schedule with automations
• nonameiguess 3y ago
  Doesn't Apple Health on its own already allow you to do all that? It'll track anything you measure directly via an Apple device like heart rate or step count, but you can also enter in measurements you got from something else, and it will integrate with exercise and diet tracking apps as long as they run on iOS. I think it's missing blood markers other than glucose, but seems to have everything else you're asking for.
• uxjw 3y ago
  I've been using https://exist.io/ https://exist.io/ for years. It can automatically sync a bunch of info from Apple Health and other providers, but also allows you to create custom data fields and manually enter data. It generates graphs and helps to find trends and correlations.
• chromano 3y ago
  I had a similar demand and started working on something for myself. It's a very simple system where you have a set of checkin buttons and a progress button at the top. There's a progress page where all checkins and progress display in a chart that can overlap, making a little easier for one to see how the progress and the checkins possibly correlate. I'm still working on a landing page, but I put some screenshots[1] together to show what I'm talking about. This is a mobile friendly application, data is grouped according to the screen width, meaning that on a computer you are able to see with more details the chart points. The system is working well for me, now I have much more content to share with my doctors and track medicine usage as well as any other event in life I'd like to track, such as sports, naps, booze etc. I'd be happy to provide access to whoever want to give it a try, just shoot me an email: username at gmail. [1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IXzFvwVjP11PtOTEvQ6Lnd4NSIorWkoB https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IXzFvwVjP11PtOTEvQ6L...
• w10-1 3y ago
  One suggestion is to build out your use-case instead of searching for a generic technology that can handle it. A general privacy-respecting health-oriented bucket of medical records is completely tangled in government regulations, organizational constraints, design-by-committee -- bureaucratic nonsense individuals don't need. It's easy to get lost in the weeds. Often what you want is to know where you stand with respect to a particular condition, say, atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease. The key thing is to build your model for evaluating that condition, e.g., LDL blood work, night-time systolic blood pressure, pulse-oximetry during exercise, exercise tolerance, etc. The model combines those things into a meaningful, actionable score. E.g., it should indicate whether to increase the statins or blood pressure medication, exercise or eat differently, investigate possible primary conditions or genetic risks, etc. I.e., the model represents the ongoing differential diagnosis, and should confirm or invalidate the hypothesis. Then you can start to prune and evolve the model and the data. Maybe the pulse-ox data after exercise, while easy to gather, really means nothing. Maybe the blood work is sensitive to recent exercise, so you get more consistent results from take 2 days off beforehand. You compare your model to the existing models - e.g., the ASCVD risk estimator - or update it to track new studies. You start to integrate other models, tracking inflammation or oxidation. As you get trends, you'll see associations. My point is that dashboard fly-over's are for executives/managers to make quick decisions about complex topics. We all want to simplify the complex, but sometimes it's actually better to dive into the details to get more clarity and understanding. In that case, what might help is a way of organizing libraries of studies and presentations, building a bunch of one-off analysis tools to ingest data and compare with other models, etc. Tying them together mainly involves deciding on your data model - typically one module per source-style and another for your own integration. wrt technologies, graph DB's are tempting, but most actual models work in excel pretty well, and pivot tables with graphs get you pretty far in analysis and visualization. Mathematica is great here for prototyping because it has proper units, sample API's, data sources, programmability, visualization, and a clean programming model and tutorials. I recommend it partly because it's a window onto everything current - LLM's, image recognition, big data, open-source data... The alternatives are to wander the wildlands of python libraries, or take the rigid Apple museum tour. Mathematica is more like wandering the museum yourself.
• NigelThornberry 3y ago
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