[hunvreus]

Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation.

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.

[hluska]

I have enjoyed lifting weights for years, but in October 2013, I took the plunge, bought a bench, some bars and some plates, and started seriously lifting.

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.

[xiaoma]

>"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."

This is the trifecta of slow—consistently low mileage, no hills and running at the same speed every workout.

[tertia]

I would be neat to see your pre and post workout blood-pressure stats too, and how that has changed over time. I can personally tell that when I squat or deadlift near my max that my BP peaks. I'd like to know how quickly it falls off after, etc. I'm also curious to know if heavy-lifting has positive effects on circulatory system elasticity.

[k-mcgrady]

I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster.

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.

[hunvreus]

IMHO, you don't need personalized data for this kind of stuff.

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.

[ska]

In my opinion you are missing two very key points.

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.

[hunvreus]

Fair enough. That being said:

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.

[k-mcgrady]

/*

- 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.

[onthedole]

Most people don't have such a high degree of intuitiveness to themselves to know what behavioural variations make any difference.

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

[icebraining]

You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns

Podcasts and music don't require screens, though, so I don't see why you're assuming that was the problem.

[gsteinb88]

Not at all to disagree, but just to clarify: drink less alcohol, drink lots more water. Minor dehydration is amazingly common and you'll be astounded how much better you feel if you force yourself to drink large amounts of water regularly.

[XorNot]

This is horrible advice. This is the type of advice which causes people to give up on what might be a modest improvement, because they rapidly find you can't get anything done when you have to get up to pee every 20 minutes.

[a8da6b0c91d]

There is zero evidence supporting the idea that drinking water beyond thirst is helpful. If anything people tend to have slight electrolyte deficiency, which is exacerbated by fluid over-consumption.

[VLM]

For "people" in general that seems correct in aggregate. For older people we have:

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.

[a8da6b0c91d]

I have got enormous value from tracking my resting heart rate and body temperature. Anything under 75 bpm or under 98F and I know I need to eat and sleep more and skip exercise. No need to log. I think a ton of folks would benefit.

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.

[spaboleo]

Uhm? Why do you consider a resting heart rate of under 75bpm to be a bad condition?

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.

[a8da6b0c91d]

Hypothyroidism. Anything much below 70 is indicative of suppressed metabolism. Up towards 90 is actually best. There are clear correlations between health, intelligence, and resting heart rate. The most intelligent people have resting heart rates up around 95 bpm.

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.

[dsjoerg]

Can you offer a reference for this claim?

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...

[aprilzero]

I'm not a doctor but I don't think that is true for most people. One of the most fit people I know has a resting heart rate of 40-50. Mine is usually 60-70 when I'm calm - when it is 80 or more something is generally off and I need to exercise more.

[a8da6b0c91d]

The low pulse of athletes is adaptively suppressed metabolism. It is not a good thing. The body deliberately reduces resting energy expenditure as a conservation measure because it anticipates the extreme energy demands of training.

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.

[kmonsen]

There seems to be very little evidence backing up your marathon reduces life statements.

[alanthonyc]

Which app do you use, may I ask?

[k-mcgrady]

'Sleep Cycle'. Orange icon with a clock on it. I was always quite skeptical of it and didn't download it until recently. It's been one of the top apps for a few years and has good reviews. I've found it to be quite accurate. It recommends that you keep your iPhone connected to a charger and under your sheet as you sleep but I've found just placing the device next to my pillow works fine and only uses about 25-30% battery life per night.

[vidyesh]

You are right. From what I see apart from use for sports professionals or people for whom physical health matters too much ( livelihood ) they would make use of it the most.

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.

[Retric]

In order to correlate with heath issues your going to need a standard to work from. Which makes collecting most of this info before 'fit-bit 12.0' or whatever somewhat pointless.

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.

[vidyesh]

The site seems to be showing that it has gathered a lot more than just eating and burning calories, safe to say such intensive data can be used to correlate with certain standard illnesses to be cautious.

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?

[hunvreus]

Do you really need an app to tell you you're not eating healthy? Nutrition and exercise aren't that hard; your body is able to let you know fairly easily when you're messing up, if not immediately at least over time. I have a very hard time believing that tracking your calories is going to significantly change your diet in the long term.

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.

[vidyesh]

There is a lot of other data these apps collect other than just the calories you eat or burn. Of course almost everything is a approximation but better than zero data on anything.

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?

[hunvreus]

Honest question; can you point me at these apps? The only stuff I've seen so far is either tracking external data (running, walking, activity, ...) or requires input (for calories for example). There are some dabbling with more interesting data (blood levels for example), but too inaccurate to be taken seriously for now.

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.

[vidyesh]

Sir, It seems you misread my first reply itself.

>...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.