The bigger question you should ask yourself, is what are you hoping to gain by tracking? I mean if you were getting results from Google sheets you would be using it today.
If you want to make it a product you need to do it in a way that makes people less paranoid, allows them to enjoy their life, doesn't try to guilt or game them into staying involved, doesn't have, lots of notifications and makes their life better as a whole. I mean it's not healthy to think about your illness 24/7.
I don't know anything about tracking your particular illness, but I have tried tracking various things in my life with varying success. Many times I've failed, but then I tried again in different ways. One thing that I noticed is that too often I would try to track too much too rigorously. It would become a burden, I would lose motivation, and I would stop.
For some things, I decided to find a way to do the minimum amount of tracking that is sustainable. One example is fitness. I tried keeping a detailed track of the kinds of exercise I do. I realized it is too much of a burden. So instead, I opted for just noting in my journal whether I did any exercise at all. And it worked. And I realized that I have capacity for more so I started marking whether I did too little, just enough, or a lot. And that was sustainable. And then I built it up some more and for one particular type of exercise, and now I track it thoroughly, while only noting the others. This is now a habit and it seems to have stuck.
So instead of starting with a thorough way of tracking something, start with a minimal way of noting and build up from there.
The reason these things did not work for me is because they were things I had to "do" as in remember/initiate so I made Crohn's AI - because its a program that runs and I just have to reply or answer when the AI-GIs contact me.
This allowed me to essentially set it and forget it until and each program is specific to each condition so its not just a dumb daily alert or something like that.
You can make yourself a program at Medicare.dev - just explain your situation or whatever and it should guide you through the rest.
No, its not a guide and there are disclaims literally everywhere. As long as you don't use the gov bar (at top of all gov websites) its OK. I work w/ people from CMS daily.
I have to track daily data for an illness. What motivates me to stay on top of it are the insights gained from the tracking. Being able to go to the doctor and answer questions definitively instead of anecdotally.
We've actually changed the therapy procedures based on the data and then been able to show it was effective with the data that came after.
So think about the insights the tracking will provide you and your doctor, and that might help motivate you.
We use old school paper and pencil. I have a clipboard with a tracking sheet created in excel with rows for each thing that needs tracking and columns for the day. Then I don't have to think, I just fill in boxes, and the pencil and paper are always right there on the wall in the bathroom, where the data is "generated" :)
This also lets me scan quickly across for daily and weekly trends. I have room at the bottom for longer notes if necessary. I put a [1] in the box and then a note that matches.
I'm not sure what you want to track but I'd recommend becoming a stationary nerd . Experiment with different notebooks, paper quality, try fountain pens, pencils, pastels... Pick the combination that brings you joy. If you find pleasure in the tactile act of putting ink (or graphite) on paper, you'll never want to quit journaling. Believe me.
I'm only half joking. Physical, handmade artefacts beat everything else, and will outlive whatever tracking app is currently trending.
I have to agree. At my gym, the people who seem to track their training mostly use paper notebooks. Even the younger people who otherwise live on their phones or post instagram videos of all their lifts. I don't notice many people using apps. Though it can be hard to tell, because e.g. a smart watch may be tracking some things automatically, or it may have computed the workout in advance.
I personally don't track, I just remember what my reps and weights are for the main lifts I do.
For tracking in general you need a system and a medium. The bullet journal method has worked well for me for many years. The systems and structures within the bullet journal change over time, but you can jump back years, and see what you were thinking at the time. More recently I have been using GTD within the bullet journal framework. I highly suggest reading at least those two methods before building your own system.
I have an llm agent with a harness that stores/logs everything in a structured manner to local files and/or sqlite. This then turns more into casual conversation type stuff. Send it test results, talk about stuff, give it updates, etc, and it handles the rest. Querying the data is pretty straight-forward without the agent since it's plaintext/sqlite. I tried random tools over time but sorta fell out of them. This is kinda the only thing that's stuck.
Could take this further and make it better with structured tooling. Some sorta CLI perhaps, or an API, that the agent knows how to use, then can build a frontend on top or something. For now this works okay.
Suppose you could use voice too, yeah. I built a k8s-based sandbox environment. One pod = one agent, and then a bunch of scaffolding around that to manage it and stuff. "Agent" here is a Claude Code instance within a pod with root access to do whatever it wants inside the pod. The main interface is Discord, but it supports other interfaces/frontends. 1 agent = 1 pod = 1 discord channel, managed by the harness. It can do other stuff too, like spawn its own pods and namespaces to build and host its own infra, new agent teams/sub-teams, but unrelated.
I mostly use text to talk to it, and send files via the Discord file sharing mechanism. Discord has voice recordings too, which are sent as .ogg files, which the agents then turn into text with Whisper.
Not quite plain Claude Code but I didn't want to go into too much depth.
The end result though is a persistent data store for each pod/agent, and then I can talk to them whenever I want from wherever I want, and interact with it with proper media support and stuff. So I have one agent that's for medical logs and such, and others for various other things.
I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.
There were two key insights for me:
- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it
- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you
You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.
I don't know anything more about your condition than a few sentences from Google.
So I don't know if tracking would or would not provide useful information for making daily choices that mitigate symptom or if tracking would have substantial on medical treatment outcomes.
And most importantly, I don't know if tracking will or won't benefit your mental well-being. Everybody copes with chronic disease differently...both the physical /medical dimensions and the emotional/psychological ones. good luck.
> Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking?
I don't know anything about your illness, but I have Type 1 Diabetes, which is a pretty high maintenance chronic illness. Many T1Ds put a lot of effort into tracking their daily numbers and routines. For example, see all the settings in this popular third party continuous glucose monitoring app[1]. It does all sorts of tracking and monitoring and giving you feedback. My cousin is also T1D and uses some similar app to manage all this stuff, always putting in all her injections and food intakes and CGM data and using that app to make predictions and judgments. It's very useful for her.
I've tried these a couple times and they just don't work for me. I'll keep up with it for like two days and then skip a few entries and then just stop.
I think part of it is, I just don't find the output from all that input very useful. I've been diabetic for more than 20 years so I'm just kinda good at it and don't get much reward for all that effort. But also my personality is very detail-oriented and my daily routine is pretty stable, so for me personally, I just don't get the value from all the tracking that people with other personalities do.
So I guess for your situation, I would ask what you expect to get out of all this effort. Find a way to make the amount of effort you have to put in match the amount of value you want to get out of it. If it requires a ton of effort to do all this tracking and all you get out of it is a couple of charts that you don't care about, then maybe your particular situation doesn't justify spending that effort. If you do actually get some value out of it, but the effort is still too high, then maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of tracking effort, even if the actual fidelity of the end results is somewhat lower.
Just some ideas from my parallel perspective. Good luck, chronic illnesses are a never ending adventure.
Pen(cil) and Paper. I keep a stock of mini memo pads in various colors for record keeping. This lets you track what you need when you need it. If you find yourself needing more room get an thin a5 notebook.
The bigger question you should ask yourself, is what are you hoping to gain by tracking? I mean if you were getting results from Google sheets you would be using it today.
If you want to make it a product you need to do it in a way that makes people less paranoid, allows them to enjoy their life, doesn't try to guilt or game them into staying involved, doesn't have, lots of notifications and makes their life better as a whole. I mean it's not healthy to think about your illness 24/7.
I don't know anything about tracking your particular illness, but I have tried tracking various things in my life with varying success. Many times I've failed, but then I tried again in different ways. One thing that I noticed is that too often I would try to track too much too rigorously. It would become a burden, I would lose motivation, and I would stop.
For some things, I decided to find a way to do the minimum amount of tracking that is sustainable. One example is fitness. I tried keeping a detailed track of the kinds of exercise I do. I realized it is too much of a burden. So instead, I opted for just noting in my journal whether I did any exercise at all. And it worked. And I realized that I have capacity for more so I started marking whether I did too little, just enough, or a lot. And that was sustainable. And then I built it up some more and for one particular type of exercise, and now I track it thoroughly, while only noting the others. This is now a habit and it seems to have stuck.
So instead of starting with a thorough way of tracking something, start with a minimal way of noting and build up from there.
The reason these things did not work for me is because they were things I had to "do" as in remember/initiate so I made Crohn's AI - because its a program that runs and I just have to reply or answer when the AI-GIs contact me.
Intent: https://wiki.crohns.ai/agent/posts/ibd-biologic-therapy-init...
Program: https://crohns.ai/program/71174-eim-joint-pain-flare
Protocol: https://crohns.ai/protocol/71174
This allowed me to essentially set it and forget it until and each program is specific to each condition so its not just a dumb daily alert or something like that.
You can make yourself a program at Medicare.dev - just explain your situation or whatever and it should guide you through the rest.
You're operating a third-party Medicare guide at "medicare.dev" with no visible disclaimer anywhere that you are not affiliated with Medicare?
No, its not a guide and there are disclaims literally everywhere. As long as you don't use the gov bar (at top of all gov websites) its OK. I work w/ people from CMS daily.
They are in the programs, when you make your program; it explains things very clearly.
Where are the disclaimers? I've clicked around, and nothing is really clear what this is, or what it isn't.
I have to track daily data for an illness. What motivates me to stay on top of it are the insights gained from the tracking. Being able to go to the doctor and answer questions definitively instead of anecdotally.
We've actually changed the therapy procedures based on the data and then been able to show it was effective with the data that came after.
So think about the insights the tracking will provide you and your doctor, and that might help motivate you.
We use old school paper and pencil. I have a clipboard with a tracking sheet created in excel with rows for each thing that needs tracking and columns for the day. Then I don't have to think, I just fill in boxes, and the pencil and paper are always right there on the wall in the bathroom, where the data is "generated" :)
This also lets me scan quickly across for daily and weekly trends. I have room at the bottom for longer notes if necessary. I put a [1] in the box and then a note that matches.
I'm not sure what you want to track but I'd recommend becoming a stationary nerd . Experiment with different notebooks, paper quality, try fountain pens, pencils, pastels... Pick the combination that brings you joy. If you find pleasure in the tactile act of putting ink (or graphite) on paper, you'll never want to quit journaling. Believe me.
I'm only half joking. Physical, handmade artefacts beat everything else, and will outlive whatever tracking app is currently trending.
Start on YT and go down the rabbit hole.
I have to agree. At my gym, the people who seem to track their training mostly use paper notebooks. Even the younger people who otherwise live on their phones or post instagram videos of all their lifts. I don't notice many people using apps. Though it can be hard to tell, because e.g. a smart watch may be tracking some things automatically, or it may have computed the workout in advance.
I personally don't track, I just remember what my reps and weights are for the main lifts I do.
Try "Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg. I found it quite interesting and I implemented few habits by using it.
Though there's ADHD and other neurodivergent scenarios, and when you have it making anything of a habit is a hard work.
Hi, ADHD here. I bought Tiny Habits. I tried reading it. Didn't get very far. You can imagine why...
Reading thread, as I've been working on something similar for a very moderate use case -- what you eat and how you feel (gas/gut, head, BM) after.
For tracking in general you need a system and a medium. The bullet journal method has worked well for me for many years. The systems and structures within the bullet journal change over time, but you can jump back years, and see what you were thinking at the time. More recently I have been using GTD within the bullet journal framework. I highly suggest reading at least those two methods before building your own system.
I have an llm agent with a harness that stores/logs everything in a structured manner to local files and/or sqlite. This then turns more into casual conversation type stuff. Send it test results, talk about stuff, give it updates, etc, and it handles the rest. Querying the data is pretty straight-forward without the agent since it's plaintext/sqlite. I tried random tools over time but sorta fell out of them. This is kinda the only thing that's stuck.
Could take this further and make it better with structured tooling. Some sorta CLI perhaps, or an API, that the agent knows how to use, then can build a frontend on top or something. For now this works okay.
So like a voice capture system, then just feed all that as raw data into an agent?
Suppose you could use voice too, yeah. I built a k8s-based sandbox environment. One pod = one agent, and then a bunch of scaffolding around that to manage it and stuff. "Agent" here is a Claude Code instance within a pod with root access to do whatever it wants inside the pod. The main interface is Discord, but it supports other interfaces/frontends. 1 agent = 1 pod = 1 discord channel, managed by the harness. It can do other stuff too, like spawn its own pods and namespaces to build and host its own infra, new agent teams/sub-teams, but unrelated.
I mostly use text to talk to it, and send files via the Discord file sharing mechanism. Discord has voice recordings too, which are sent as .ogg files, which the agents then turn into text with Whisper.
Not quite plain Claude Code but I didn't want to go into too much depth.
The end result though is a persistent data store for each pod/agent, and then I can talk to them whenever I want from wherever I want, and interact with it with proper media support and stuff. So I have one agent that's for medical logs and such, and others for various other things.
I have an app I built for myself (because I couldn't find anything appropriate) to ask me questions via notifications like rating how I feel, how's my sleep, am I alert, eating well etc. its probablistic both in when it alerts and what it asks and I power a self monitoring dashboard off the back of it.
There were two key insights for me:
- too frequent or predictable and I'll ignore it
- always being reminded about something negative is bad for you
You didn't give a lot of information in your question; so that is my two cents.
I've previously built a startup in this exact space (tracking of rheumatoid illnesses). We had a good collaboration with Charité Berlin, but it didn't take off as a business.
Happy to chat and learn what you're up to: hthh19xq@anonaddy.me
Serious questions:
Why do you try to track it?
Do you want to track it?
I don't know anything more about your condition than a few sentences from Google.
So I don't know if tracking would or would not provide useful information for making daily choices that mitigate symptom or if tracking would have substantial on medical treatment outcomes.
And most importantly, I don't know if tracking will or won't benefit your mental well-being. Everybody copes with chronic disease differently...both the physical /medical dimensions and the emotional/psychological ones. good luck.
> Is this a common experience or do I just have to be better at tracking?
I don't know anything about your illness, but I have Type 1 Diabetes, which is a pretty high maintenance chronic illness. Many T1Ds put a lot of effort into tracking their daily numbers and routines. For example, see all the settings in this popular third party continuous glucose monitoring app[1]. It does all sorts of tracking and monitoring and giving you feedback. My cousin is also T1D and uses some similar app to manage all this stuff, always putting in all her injections and food intakes and CGM data and using that app to make predictions and judgments. It's very useful for her.
I've tried these a couple times and they just don't work for me. I'll keep up with it for like two days and then skip a few entries and then just stop.
I think part of it is, I just don't find the output from all that input very useful. I've been diabetic for more than 20 years so I'm just kinda good at it and don't get much reward for all that effort. But also my personality is very detail-oriented and my daily routine is pretty stable, so for me personally, I just don't get the value from all the tracking that people with other personalities do.
So I guess for your situation, I would ask what you expect to get out of all this effort. Find a way to make the amount of effort you have to put in match the amount of value you want to get out of it. If it requires a ton of effort to do all this tracking and all you get out of it is a couple of charts that you don't care about, then maybe your particular situation doesn't justify spending that effort. If you do actually get some value out of it, but the effort is still too high, then maybe you can find a way to reduce the amount of tracking effort, even if the actual fidelity of the end results is somewhat lower.
Just some ideas from my parallel perspective. Good luck, chronic illnesses are a never ending adventure.
[1] https://navid200.github.io/xDrip/docs/Settings/MainSettings....
Pen(cil) and Paper. I keep a stock of mini memo pads in various colors for record keeping. This lets you track what you need when you need it. If you find yourself needing more room get an thin a5 notebook.
> Im building something for this
You've probably answered your own question here. Welcome to the age of bespoke LLM coded apps where almost everyone can build the thing they want.