Reasons for and against self tracking and quantification

There are many reasons people engage in self tracking and there are many reasons people choose not to. This page is a summary of a more through argument map.

Reasons For

Manage health conditions

Doctors get much more precise, objective, and detailed description from data than patients provide verbally. This has been good enough to prove something to doubters, even to the medical community. Patients get a clearer picture of their health which they can use to make better decisions. Patients can gauge their doctor's performance better. Self tracking could reduce medical costs.

Chronic or sub-clinical health conditions, 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 health tracking. Even if no remedies are found, tracking provides piece of mind by showing the patient that this condition is like previous ones that have resolved.

Unfortunately, sub-clinical issues are often esoteric and so require elusive or underdeveloped tools. At the same time, serious chronic conditions are more likely to be tracked with expensive, restricted to the public, or closed data devices.

Improve Fitness, Mood, Productivity, and Cognitive abilities

For example: What is the optimum amount of coffee to improve productivity but not affect sleep? This is very similar to trying to improve a chronic health condition, except that it can be useful to anybody and does not deal with critical issues.

People have gone through life always being mediocre because they did not try to improve themselves systematically. What if you are that kind of person? This method has precedents outside of personal science. Many professionals, especially coaches of athletes, measure and try to improve every little thing to boost overall performance.

Protect your self

Even if you have no health problems and do not intend to improve anything, you should continuously monitor the vitals (same as in 'improve' above) that your doctors do not. Sickness can be subtle. It can harm you in a way that you do not notice but that could affect you a lot. For example slight dietary changes could increase resting heart rate and more noise could drastically reduce productivity.

Unhealthy products are ubiquitous. Digital addiction Games like flappy bird, apps like Facebook and Youtube, and many foods are designed to be bought, often without concern for the health of the customer. Technological innovation grows so fast that culture and regulators can not keep up.

Travel can be unhealthy in unexpected ways. Quality of sanitation and health care varies between countries. Health advisories about foreign countries are abundant. Digital nomads should maintain a diary of symptoms to notice uncommon diseases in addition to vitals.

Long term vitals monitoring provides safety baselines for self experimentation with exciting interventions like nootropics. Just imagine someone trying out long term fasting and not noticing a strong increase in resting heart rate. In addition, if you ever change your mind about experimenting to improve vitals you will have lots of data to compare against data gained during interventions.

Tools to save your life can also record data. For examples; Apple watch monitors for arrhythmia, medicine trackers for the goal of safety can also help monitor health conditions, and hiking is made much safer with GPS.

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.

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

Self tracking takes too much time and effort every day.

Active Tracking is time consuming, though, automatic data recording is usually not. Some things can only be tracked manually. Studies and experience show people dropping even almost completely automated fitness tracking smart watches. If self tracking becomes a habit it will require less effort. Effort is hard to define, e.x. some people like Journaling and others do not.

• Almost none: Smart Watches and Rings , Automatic Time tracking, already tracked personal data like Social media or your Calendar , public info like Outdoor Weather,
• A few minutes each day: Weight scale, Exercise Heart Rate Strap, Rating Mood at end of each day.
• Over 10 minutes each day: Cognitive Tests, Diet tracking, manual Time tracking, Journaling

Users may forget to fill out entries. Self assessment requires extra thinking and attention to mistakes. If the effort is not put in, the variable will end up with more noise and any statistical tests with it will require more data.

Health tracking presents privacy concerns

Most consumers already give lots of data to companies, such as their location via GPS, social media, and their search and browsing history. Employees already monitor employee health to optimize the performance of their employees. It is possible to do basic cognitive and psychological assessment via background things like speed of typing, semantic analysis and emotion detection via cameras. Companies regularly hoard customer data, sell it to 3rd party aggregators, and get hacked.

Never the less self trackers can make more data available. In particular, many devices measure stress and Mood through heart rate and Galvanic skin response, kind of like a polygraph.

Such data has ended up in the hands of employers to squeeze the most out of their employees, mortgage lenders, and insurers to adjust rates. It was even used to support discrimination and as evidence in court.

Self tracking user has some options for defense. Data protection regulations grow.[1] Government classified Medical Devices make medical data and that data is under more protection than basic commercial device data. Data can be anonymized, though often its not hard to deanonymize it. User should choose terms of service that require opt-in. Open source apps, and some commercial ones, are under your complete control and will not mind if the device its on never connects to the internet. This wiki will note open source tools and tools with exceptional demand or lack there of for user data.

Recording is not necessary to find relationships

User could just mentally compare one day and the next. Far fewer of the issues listed in this section apply to 'mental comparison'. In particular user saves time and privacy. Many purposes for self tracking can not be satisfied by just paying attention. Most relationships user would want to uncover require statistical analysis, especially strong effects that can only be seen across long periods. Though, more important effects are usually more sever and easier to notice. Many things a user would want to track required a device and can then be automatically tracked with very little effort on the user's part. 'Mental comparison' relies completely on Self assessment with all its issues and minus a few of the mellowing techniques. This alternative method to self tracking is easier though rarely usable.

Finding and setting up data sources takes time.

User could follow someone else's made trail, such as reading this wiki, instead of researching everything themselves. Uncommon problems, and the exploration inherent in science, require custom data sources that have not been documented here. Greed motivates many companies to make fake and useless devices and interventions. Many of the issues described on this page, data access, data quality (devices often cover up bad signal with guesswork), and price are all constraints which make finding a good enough device harder. See Commercial, Medical Device, or Open Source .

Analysis algorithms are either hard to use or too incapable.

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.

Sources like food companies will have a reason to give bad data. Persons can have bias too.

Negative engagement of User

Such as becoming obsessed with data tracking. Psychological effects of tracking . People do not want to find out somethings, like a genetic predisposition to a disease they can not treat. In addition who would want to drill/agonize/focus on their problems?

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