[frio]

As someone both with a chronic disease, and who works in Health IT -- personal health tracking is something I'd very much like to see (and am working on in my spare time).

Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that course of time, you just don't notice you're getting worse -- what's an extra minute of cramping, introduced over the course of a month? Having a tool which tracked me, and would let me see (in a chart plotted over time) that I've crossed a line and need to seek help would probably have helped me avoid a week-long stay in hospital, and a commitment to take some (relatively) nasty drugs for the next couple of months.

When I got released, I went and bought a Fitbit Aria for weight-tracking (and am building something that'll query their API and expose my weight data, alongside other data I'll track via a mobile app), and it's excellent. The ease-of-use is the main thing; not needing to manually enter my weight after weighing myself means my data's always there. I'm not sure how I'll accomplish that for the other stuff I want to track, but it should be interesting figuring it out!

So, in short: this is an area I'm stoked to see investment in.

[pc86]

How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific example.

That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.

[frio]

Cramping's one of my symptoms; I'm being a bit coy. To be more blunt (the disease is Ulcerative Colitis), the main thing is bowel movements per day. At the moment, I've got an NFC tag sitting in the bathroom that I swipe to log a motion (as the path of least resistance)... but (as mucky as it sounds) I'd like to hack something together with an Arduino/Raspberry Pi and a weight sensor attached to the toilet, which could detect that I'm sitting down and log a movement for me automatically (in much the same way the Aria automatically logs my weight!).

This'd need to tie into a mobile app for manual logging anyway (I'm not exactly going to rig this up at work!) with a backing web service, but yeah. There's definitely room for something clever in this space :).

[pc86]

That's a really good idea. I could see a small Arduino board with wifi and a FlexiForce[0] (just the first thing that came up in Google for "Arduino weight sensor"), and like you said a mobile component that would either be a stopwatch to actually log or a time entry for past movements (or when you didn't have your phone, etc).

My sister has Crohn's and one of college roommates had UC so I'm somewhat familiar with it.

My contact info is in my profile if you want to talk about this more.

[0] http://bildr.org/2012/11/flexiforce-arduino/

[tamersalama]

That device is represented in every phone and tablet. It just needs the software to capture it.

[jacalata]

It doesn't even need to be real-time. An app/text message that asks you every three hours "been cramping up lately?: No, once or twice, several times, lots"* would collect a lot of relatively accurate information, and easily show you 'whoa, I cramped up almost every hour this week, two months ago it was once a day!'

*in my answers I'm assuming that we are tracking the incidence count, rather than duration/severity - this is easily adapted if necessary.