Ask HN: I want to create a personal health dashboard, what should I use?

smartwatches can measure a lot automatically

most medical practices have your test results available online

not sure why/how you need to merge blood tests and watch data for a meaningful benefit

otherwise, spend time cleaning up your diet and improving your exercise and sleep...you can't get healthy just moving data around

The LoseIt app has goal tracking, mostly for weight loss, but also has a blood pressure, blood glucose and body measurements, nutrition, exercise and of course calorie tracking with a lot of food data. It syncs with Apple watch for exercise and does some calorie computation based on that. As you lose weight it also re-computes your daily calorie goal. It has charts and keeps history.

It doesn't appear you can add random things to track as a goal and chart them but there are notes which might be more appropriate for cholesterol and blood test results since those are infrequent I assume.

I doubt you will find anything which does just what you want. I created a Google form in 2020 which sends data into sheets where I have some routines to analyse it. Still going and works well.

You might find https://howisfelix.today/? interesting, as both inspiration/prior-art/cautionary tale.

Disclaimer: Engineer for the app...

If you're an engineer and interested in building a little application then read on! CommonHealth is a (free, non profit) app that patients can use to download their health data from their health care providers. We're all about open interoperability with the ability to for developers to build on top of the app using the SDK to ingest the data of a patient and build any visualizations/analytics etc.

There's zero backend data aggregation, all data lives ONLY on your personal device once you download it from your health provider, and all data is thus deleted if you simply uninstall the app.

So that's to say, if you're in the US market and want to build your own functionality, you definitely have that opportunity, as we've done the work connecting to 1000s of providers (with 100k+ coming by end of year)

Reach out if you want to get started here

https://www.commonhealth.org/developers#dev-link-4

Apple health

A combination of Grafana, a custom API and integration with Excel and HealthKit would be my choices.

I concur that fragmentation kills our ability to custom-build these tools. I'm in the same position, I want to gather and have a single glass pane view of my meds, glucose, A1C, Weight, Exercise, Doctor Visits/Notes and Lab results.

I'll jot this down on my PARA inbox. ;)

Maybe Airtable?

I worked on something in the space and one of the challenges we ran into was pulling data from Apple Health. At the time there was no API (haven't checked recently) so if we wanted that data we would have needed to build an app. There were companies that had apps/APIs but the price seemed to start at $30k which didn't make sense for us.

Context: we were mostly focused on activity metrics.

I might be able to help just out of curiosity and interest. Reach out at hi at mrassili dot com and let’s talk

No connection to the app but you should check out https://www.humanity.health/

Maybe sqlite - easy to transfer what you have and you can have a doc handy for doing nice queries. Once you figure out core functions you can facilitate interaction more with a UI or CLI, and some polling functions for remote data.

There used to be this: https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d2...

Which he then turned into this: https://gyrosco.pe/home/

Here, this was asked a few weeks ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36025977

Shameless plug for Saltcorn (https://saltcorn.com), which is the simplest and open sourciest way of creating a database web application for when you want an upgrade from Excel to proper tables with fields and relationships. Data viz, pivot table plugins available.

Shameless plug: my.aidlab.com. It is free unless you want to store raw data of ecg/chest movements.

I just use the iOS Health app to do all that. It's too much work to duplicate that into another system, IMHO.

I even jam additional info like mood, weight, and blood pressure and other metrics into it with Shortcuts, which speeds up the process.

Doesn't Apple Health on its own already allow you to do all that? It'll track anything you measure directly via an Apple device like heart rate or step count, but you can also enter in measurements you got from something else, and it will integrate with exercise and diet tracking apps as long as they run on iOS. I think it's missing blood markers other than glucose, but seems to have everything else you're asking for.

I've been using https://exist.io/ for years. It can automatically sync a bunch of info from Apple Health and other providers, but also allows you to create custom data fields and manually enter data. It generates graphs and helps to find trends and correlations.

One suggestion is to build out your use-case instead of searching for a generic technology that can handle it.

A general privacy-respecting health-oriented bucket of medical records is completely tangled in government regulations, organizational constraints, design-by-committee -- bureaucratic nonsense individuals don't need. It's easy to get lost in the weeds.

Often what you want is to know where you stand with respect to a particular condition, say, atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.

The key thing is to build your model for evaluating that condition, e.g., LDL blood work, night-time systolic blood pressure, pulse-oximetry during exercise, exercise tolerance, etc. The model combines those things into a meaningful, actionable score. E.g., it should indicate whether to increase the statins or blood pressure medication, exercise or eat differently, investigate possible primary conditions or genetic risks, etc. I.e., the model represents the ongoing differential diagnosis, and should confirm or invalidate the hypothesis.

Then you can start to prune and evolve the model and the data. Maybe the pulse-ox data after exercise, while easy to gather, really means nothing. Maybe the blood work is sensitive to recent exercise, so you get more consistent results from take 2 days off beforehand. You compare your model to the existing models - e.g., the ASCVD risk estimator - or update it to track new studies. You start to integrate other models, tracking inflammation or oxidation. As you get trends, you'll see associations.

My point is that dashboard fly-over's are for executives/managers to make quick decisions about complex topics. We all want to simplify the complex, but sometimes it's actually better to dive into the details to get more clarity and understanding.

In that case, what might help is a way of organizing libraries of studies and presentations, building a bunch of one-off analysis tools to ingest data and compare with other models, etc. Tying them together mainly involves deciding on your data model - typically one module per source-style and another for your own integration.

wrt technologies, graph DB's are tempting, but most actual models work in excel pretty well, and pivot tables with graphs get you pretty far in analysis and visualization. Mathematica is great here for prototyping because it has proper units, sample API's, data sources, programmability, visualization, and a clean programming model and tutorials. I recommend it partly because it's a window onto everything current - LLM's, image recognition, big data, open-source data... The alternatives are to wander the wildlands of python libraries, or take the rigid Apple museum tour. Mathematica is more like wandering the museum yourself.

[dead]