There are many services today that allow you to track your activities, like Foursquare, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Moves, Nike+ Running, iBiker, Momento, Digifit, iTrackMyTime, Mymee, Sleep Cycle… And devices like Fitbit, Nike Fuel band, Jawbone Up, Amiigo, Basis, BodyMedia FIT, Looxcie, Memoto, Muse, Shine, WakeMate, Zeo… In total, there are more than 200 devices and services you can use to track your activities. The aim is to help people to keep better track of their lives, presenting the data they collected and allowing them to set some goals, assisting them to change their behaviour, for example.
Millions of people use these services, but they are not really effective. For example, if you forget to wear your Fitbit in the morning you went to run, it will mess with your statistics, and you can’t correct it! If your Fitbit stopped working, and you got a Nike Fuel band, all the data you had from your Fitbit will not be used anymore, and as the data visualisation is different, it will not be easy to compare your activities, or just browse your activities history during the last few months.
What I am doing is an application that allows you to explore, annotate and correct the data you collected about your activities, in a personal data store (so all the data you have is stored on your computer, it’s private), and it doesn’t matter from where the data came from. Cool, right?
I’m using D3 to build some of the visualisations. D3 is a javascript library to manipulate documents using data. It can sound boring, but it allows you to create amazing visualisations! Look at that:
Soon I will post more reports of my progress! This project is really interesting 🙂
See you!
Gustavo
The Social Machinists 