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For me, it has served a similar purpose to the dashboard in a car or plane. This latest design also slightly reflects that visually. When you're driving a car, you're not staring at the speedometer, or constantly checking the gas meter, but they're still useful tools. Especially when things start to go wrong. If you're almost out of gas or in the redline, then it becomes much more useful. The other thing to note is that this isn't finished. The new structure — splitting things up by brain, heart, core, fitness, travel — is something we designed to grow into. There are tons of new data points we want to add, which will hopefully improve the actionability. Maybe you already have a sense of how much you've walked today and the step counter may not seem that exciting, but that same logic doesn't apply for things like Vitamin D or Glucose, where having good visibility and software is much more valuable. Each of the various sections has already had pretty significant effects on me as we've been building this. They are mostly very svbtle changes, like trying to walk more every day instead of taking Ubers after seeing how low my steps were, or realizing how much time during the day I was spending on Twitter after seeing that in the graph, or seeing how much weight I had gained in just a couple weeks and switching to ordering food from Sprig instead of Caviar. Seeing the map of where I went last month has led me to venture out of SOMA more and mix up my routine, which also improves some of the other sections. Theoretically I could've realized and done all those things without seeing any of the data, but it is unlikely. Some things like heart rate I haven't really done anything about, but it is cool to just see it automatically come in every day. The lowest and resting heart rates are quite variable and seem to be much lower around days when I exercise properly, so that would be a fun thing to try to optimize for and some people have used it that way. My blood pressure also seems to be high, which I haven't really done anything about lately, but having that alert constantly there keeps it on my todo list. |
I could see down the line how measuring continuously vital signs and blood work could help us detect or prevent illnesses or risky behaviors, but the complexity of its analysis will demand something a lot more intuitive than a dashboard. As of now though, these are all vanity metrics, just as useful as tracking the number of visitors landing on your front page.
I appreciate the car analogy, but if you car were as well designed as your body, you would not need a dashboard. Getting more sleep, controlling your food intake, getting more exercise, drinking less... It doesn't take a dashboard to know when you should act on it; your body let you know naturally. You get fat, tire easily, yawn, feel like your overate.
Knowing what to do isn't the hard part, your mom probably told you everything you should be doing since you were able to take your own decisions ("Don't stay up late", "Go play outside", "Eat your greens"). But as pretty as our tool is, I see this as useful as the tons of gadgets and fancy sport gears I see people wearing at the gym: a palliative which distracts us from the real hard work.