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]

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]

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.

[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.