Building Tools

For the better part of a year, I’ve been trying to build a system to capture and analyze data points – on me.  This is part of a long-shot plan to find out what might be contributing to my headaches.  I’m pleased to say that since July of 2015, I’ve been successfully capturing over a dozen data points on myself, multiple times a day.

I started out with the easiest thing that could work: an alarm clock telling me to take a survey every 15 minutes, and a Windows desktop app called iSelfSurvey that saved its data to a text file.

Then, in mid-January, I launched an Android version of iSelfSurvey that allows me to capture data outside of the 7:30-5 that I’m at my computer at work.

 

Late last year, I also built a companion application called iSelfAnalysis that allows me to upload those data files, and then run a number of functions on the data, looking for patterns.

For example: is there any correlation of the severity of my headaches to the number of hours of sleep that I got the night before?  Is there any correlation to the amount of liquid I’ve been drinking?  How about if my blood sugar takes a dive 4 hours ago – does that affect my headaches now?  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the kinds of questions I can ask – and now answer.  I now have the tools in place to run experiments on myself – experiments where I adjust one data point and observe how my headaches react.

Is this system over the top?  Have I spent too much time sharpening my axe?  No.  Asking anyone to answer a dozen questions every 15 minutes is moderately intrusive at best.  Trying to analyze the data by hand would get old after about a day.  This system takes as much of the pain out of this process as I can manage, and makes it far more likely that I’ll continue day after day after day.

I have 127 days’ worth of data collected so far – thousands of data points.  I don’t expect to find any smoking guns, but if I can find ways to minimize my headaches, I’ll consider that a win.