Reasons for and against self tracking and quantification

A summary of the much more thorough debate and argument map on kialo:

https://www.kialo.com/everyone-should-health-track---self-quantify-49787

Reasons For

Improve the management of health conditions

Sub-clinical issues are issues doctors can only fix with data provided by personal health tracking. Some remedies can only be tested with self tracking. The effects of lifestyle choices like veganism on health may need to be monitored.

Motivate lifestyle 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. Self tracking can help build healthy habits. Health tracking can once again help find the best method or remedy.

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

Professional coaches do this. QS projects have found interventions that help these like creatine for cognitive functioning.

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 Difficulties

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 are all constraints making finding a good enough devise all the harder.