Reasons for and against self tracking and quantification

There is a wide array of reasons for and against engaging in self-tracking, this article provides a summary of a debate through an argument map on kialo .

Reasons For

Improve the management of health conditions

Doctors get much more precise, objective and detailed description than patients provide verbally. Patients get a clearer picture of their health.

Chronic health, sub-clinical problems, and effects of lifestyle choices like veganism, may be monitored using personal health tracking. Remedies such as weight loss diets and melatonin can be tested for effectiveness with self health tracking. Even if no remedies are found, knowing not to worry or bother is worthwhile information.

Unfortunately, sub-clinical issues are often esoteric and so require elusive or underdeveloped tools.

Motivate behavior change

Gamification seems pretty popular and it requires tracking. Most consumer wearables include lots of motivating information. Just watching the numbers improve or be recorded can be quite motivating and build healthy habits; according to personal experience DG (talk) and Atomic Habits book. Health tracking can determine the best behavior change technique for each individual. Problems usually have easier solutions than just relying on willpower such as a way to make a necessary habit much more fun or that underneath the problem is a health issue.

Optimize health, productivity, education, sports training, and cognitive functioning.

Exactly how much coffee do you need and when is it so much that it affects sleep? Professional coaches use health tracking. QS projects have found interventions that help these like creatine for cognitive functioning. For more examples see https://wiki.openhumans.org/wiki/List_of_Interesting_Self-Tracking_Results.

Contribute your data to medical research.

Variety of literature shows the validity of N-of-1 approaches.

Lifelogging, Introspection

Can be fun. Store important memories.

Reasons Against and Problems

Choosing, setting up, and connecting user's selection of apps and devices can be quite a bit of work. Or expensive.

User could follow someone else's made trail such as reading this wiki instead of researching everything themselves. Custom data sources such as for rare problems that have not been documented here are still a problem. Privacy, data access, data quality, and price are all constraints which make finding a good enough device harder.

Self tracking takes too much time and effort every day.

Manual entry is time consuming though automatic data recording is usually not. Studies and experience show people dropping even fitness trackers.

People make mistakes forget and slack when recording data manually

Self-report is a common concern in studies.

Health tracking presents privacy concerns

GPS can reveal delicate information. Same with emotion detection. Employees already monitor employee health. User has some options for defense. Data protection regulations grow.

Analysis algorithms are either hard to use or too simple

All apps besides OH with any ability to analyze just use linear regression. Just read an article in nature where ML was used on multiple N-of-1 studies but that approach was lacking and is difficult for the average user to set up.

Negative engagement of User

such as becoming obsessed with data tracking.

People do not want to know somethings

Like a genetic predisposition to a disease they can not treat.

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We talked about this topic in the following meetings
2022-06-23 Self-Research Chat