Quantify me

24 February 2017: Almost all of this is dead and gone now. I'm still using Sleep Cycle. The others, not so much.

I am not an obsessive self-quantifier, nor am I in training, so I don't have goals to score or targets to hit. I just like to measure a few things like weight and activity each day to make sure things are not creeping away from me. To do that, I have several simple tools. Some -- Moves, Sleep Cycle -- are on my phone. Others -- weight -- require scales, a pencil and a calendar. (Yes, I know ... how quaint.) What I'd like is some place to store those numbers and let me play with them. Ideally, I'd like that place to get the raw data automatically from the phone, although I'd be happy to enter my weight by hand.

Searching for "record self data online" is salutary, in that the top search engine result explains How To Protect Your Data And Remove Personal Information From The Internet, a sign of the times for sure. There's a website called Quantified Self that seems to be mostly a guide to what's available in the way of tracking tools, rather than ways to explore and make use of what you've tracked. Moves.app will allow me to share my data there with some of those other tracking sites, but those sites, at least in their free versions, seem to be little more than ways to target ads for heart-rate monitors to people who are already monitoring their heart rate. In other words, I haven't yet found the tool I'm looking for.

I'll keep looking, but in the meanwhile I have some thoughts. One would be for Moves or Sleep Cycle to allow me to record some additional observations each day. Another would be to attempt to roll my own, using R and clues provided by friends on ADN. Best of all would be to persuade some of those ADN friends to do it for me (and the rest of us). After all, Narrato ¹ speaks to Moves and to ADN. Could it also speak to Sleep Cycle? And allow me to enter my weight by hand? Could it, further, be persuaded to send a suitably formatted message to ADN to await further processing?

I live in hope.

p.s. Although this is appearing on New Year's Day, it has nothing to do with resolutions of any sort, but Happy New Year anyway.