Vaporware: Post-hoc symptom tracker

[azurelunatic]

This is a web-based application for user-submitted possible cause and symptom tracking. It has email, web, IM, and text message interfaces.

Users submit timestamped exposures to possible irritants or other possibly problematic activities, and also timestamped medical symptoms, either real-time or backdated (or planned). Each item can be tagged and charted. Tagged exposures can be charted with tagged symptoms. This is not intended to diagnose anything, and is no substitute for a medical professional looking over this, but it may be a valuable diagnostic aid.

As such, all user accounts are by default protected, although invitations to view data may be issued. Data may be made public by the user, in whole or in part.

Inspired by my friend who uses a locked-down, friendless Twitter to track food consumption, and my subsequent recommendation of same to another friend who wants to track IBS symptoms against foods, but has no attention span. I was thinking in the shower that this would be even more useful with some basic calendar and analytic functions.

Comments

[pauamma]

Would also be useful for allergen/food intolerance/chemical sensitivity tracking (instead or in addition to controlled exposure/inoculation testing)

[azurelunatic]

I was thinking of it primarily for allergen/food intolerance, actually.

[azurelunatic]

Must be able to parse natural language. Should have hookups so that people can just put tagged stuff on Twitter or something, so an API as well, for client funtimes. Must be able to take durationed events as well as zero-duration events, and vague "sometime in this day" events.

[jeshyr]

Would also love sleep tracking - both input as "slept 8 hours" and also as 2 separate messages ie "went to sleep 11pm" or "going to sleep now" and "woke up 9am" or "just woke up"

The hugest amount of natural language parsing so people don't have to think about the input too much, with ones the system isn't sure about held for review on the web interface.

Automatic weather tracking (if desired) based on user's entered location and WeatherUnderground's APIs? I know weather has a huge effect on my symptoms.

More as I think of it, if OK?

[azurelunatic]

Oh yes.

[azurelunatic]

Should support multiple levels of user-defined tagging, with some pre-defined tag suites.

[jeshyr]

Also some variables have amounts that matter - stress is a big one for me, a stress level of 8/10 is an almost guaranteed migraine trigger, whereas a stress level of 4/10 is less significant. So "stress today is 4/10" or "stress yesterday was 10/10 (cat died)" would be handy.

[azurelunatic]

So the ability to rate severity/intensity within a category would be necessary, as well as the ability to provide notes about a thing.

[jeshyr]

yes, that :) Notes are important for remembering.

Not everything needs severity/intensity/amonut rating though. But some should.

Also would be cool (later?) to build in smartness which tries to find correlations itself!

[azurelunatic]

It would make sense to me to make amount-rating available for everything, with the possibility of true/false, null, and unrated entry, so people could use it or not as was appropriate, rather than attempting to decide beforehand where it made sense.

The possibility for that smartness was one of the things that I was thinking should happen, yes. :D

[jeshyr]

Yes, that.

Also graphs ... I want to say "show me a graph of x and y" and it will graph x and y against time for me. We'd have to come up with some way of dealing with true/false and empty values when graphic against numerical values though ... hmm ... I would think perhaps a background-colour on the entire height of the column for true, and an empty one for false, whereas a numerical value gets graphed as normal? Something anyway.

Then I can use my brain to see correlations too :)

[azurelunatic]

Or true as 10 and false as 0, on a 0-10 scale, with a separate indicator to tell that it's a boolean.

[azurelunatic]

Another user interface idea: transparent colored overlays, a la the Council of Counts desk layout flimsies.

[soph.livejournal.com]

I love this idea.

The biggest problem, though, is going to be the legal side of things. You'll be having people entering medical data; that's going to be fairly heavily protected under law, I suspect, and there might be a lot of paperwork to deal with. In other words, it might only be something an organisation would be able to host.

Or I might just be speaking rubbish.

[azurelunatic]

Common sense tells me that if somewhere were accepting records from someone who identified themselves as a user's doctor, there would be hella paperwork. Common sense also tells me that if somewhere offered to dump a user's records on the user's indirect say-so to someone who identified themselves as the user's doctor, there would be paperwork.

I'd want a Real Legal Opinion on this, but a person's own medical data is that person's own property, and that person may choose to keep it private or publish it in classified newspaper ads, so long as it's that person doing the doing.

Likewise, if a person is keeping track of any given dang thing on their own, for example, tracking the progress of their depression in their LJ, they can do it in as public or as private a way as they care to, but the instant they hand those things over to their doctor, their doctor has to treat them confidentially no matter how public they are on the internet.

I think the real problem would be to not accidentally attempt to practice medicine, at which point all sorts of regulations would come in. But as long as any public installation of it was very clearly a tool to help private individuals personally track factors in their lives and things that might result from those factors, and did not attempt to actually diagnose any potential condition, one might be able to avoid excessive amounts of red tape.

[jeshyr]

Think it should be OK as long as just patients entering OWN data and getting OWN records. Think of dieting websites like FitDay and SparkPeople - don't think they have mass red tape. At least not noticably...

Anyway, could build for just us&friends to start, then check about red tape if looked good 'nuff to expand :)