Health Empowerment through Self-Tracking

The BodyTrack project has interviewed a number of people who have improved their health by discovering certain foods or environmental exposures to avoid, or learning other types of behavioral changes. Many describe greatly improved quality of life, overcoming in some cases chronic problems in areas such as sleep, pain, gastrointestinal function, and energy levels. In some cases, a doctor or specialist’s diagnosis led to treatment which mitigated symptoms (e.g. asthma or migraine headache), but where discovery of triggers required self-tracking and self-experimentation.

Importantly, the act of starting to search for one’s sensitivities or triggers appears to be empowering: people who embarked on this path changed their relationship to their health situation even before making the discoveries that helped lead to symptom improvement.

The BodyTrack Project is building tools, both technological and cultural, to empower more people to embrace an “investigator” role in their own lives. The core of the BodyTrack system is an open source web service which allows users to aggregate, visualize, and analyze data from a myriad of sources—physiological metrics from wearable sensors, image and self-observation capture from smart phones, local environmental measures such as bedroom light and noise levels and in-house air quality monitoring, and regional environmental measures such as pollen/mold counts and air particulates. We believe empowering a broader set of people with these tools will help individuals and medical practitioners alike to better address health conditions with complex environmental or behavioral components.