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Ask HN: Do you know of any project with the goal to log and map a human life?

31 points| tdist | 8 years ago | reply

I'm looking for some kind of undergoing study that follows an individual with the goal to completely map that individual's life.

Measured data could include: - Exact daily diet proportions - Daily air quality - Steps per day - Minutes of physical exercise per week - Monthly vitamin readings - Weekly blood pressure - Hourly/Daily blood sugar - Minutes of social interaction per day - Monthly wage - Daily self-estimated happiness - Daily self-estimated worth etc.

What I'm looking for should be trying to map all possible long term health contributing factors in an individual's life.

Do you know of anything like this? Mayhap not even a study, but someone's personal project that they publicize on the web?

18 comments

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[+] Twisell|8 years ago|reply
This sound like Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile.

The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_Chronofile

Wonder if you could grab a hand on it through it's foundation archive.

[+] Cyph0n|8 years ago|reply
That's... god damn impressive. I can't even maintain a simple diary for over 2 weeks without lapsing...
[+] jitl|8 years ago|reply
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but related: https://camlistore.org/, see also https://camlistore.org/doc/overview

I thought of Camlistore because it’s goal is

> Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

However, it’s more of a general storage system or diary than a quantified self application.

From the homepage:

> Camlistore is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.

Camlistore was started by Brad Fitzgerald (Golang core member and Memcached author)

[+] andai|8 years ago|reply
Every Facebook user, ten years in the future?

Seriously though, that does seem to be the direction things are headed.

[+] miguelrochefort|8 years ago|reply
That's called "quantified self".

I wish there was a systematically way to do that. I'd be the first to opt-in.

Privacy is overrated. It does more harm than good. Transparency is clearly the way forward, and what we'll lean from large-scale quantified-self will show that.

I'm confident that the model will soon switch from companies paying users (usually with services) to collect their data, to users paying companies to collect their data.

[+] andai|8 years ago|reply
That's a very interesting expectation! What makes you confident in that?
[+] LeozMax|8 years ago|reply
As long as it's volontary, fine. If you map me behind my back though, be prepared to defend your butt coze I'm definitely kick it.
[+] aquilax|8 years ago|reply
Public Gyroscope profiles show some data like: https://gyrosco.pe/aquilax/zero/

I'm using command line tools with text files as storage to track as much as possible, ledger for finance and two more tools I've built for tracking daily nutrition and timed events. Have a bash script generating a report every hour but don't make these public.

[+] poirier|8 years ago|reply
I built something in this vein 6.5 years ago, and used version 1 daily* since, capturing data on myself to measure intent vs reality and what factors improved/screwed up my own life, all the while building in self awareness.

Here's why: http://meometer.com/why/.

Version 2 — which I worked on for the past 3 months — comes out in a few weeks and we're looking for beta testers.

[edit: clarity]

*almost

[+] lalalawrence|8 years ago|reply
Try Facebook? There is someone out there ocd with themselves ?
[+] thebiglebrewski|8 years ago|reply
entire.life !
[+] chadoh_|8 years ago|reply
Aw thanks, @thebiglebrewski! I'm the creator of https://entire.life, and I'm happy to see people are finding it from this post.

While at this point in time Entire.Life is a rather poor fit for what @tdist is looking for, I think its approach works better for most people who aren't looking for such nitty gritty details of the minutia of every day. It's good for getting perspective and documenting The Big Things, but so far isn't great for tracking _everything_.

That said, my ambitions are larger than that. There's the whole Entire.Life Emporium (https://entire.life/emporium), which right now has a very humble offering of things I hand-built, but which I aspire to open up to other developers in the future. I think integrations with Fitbit, Strava, etc would make complete sense for Entire.Life. And in that way, if you're as comfortable as @miguelrochefort with having corporations collect all of your data for you and then rent it back to you, you'll be able to use Entire.Life as a window into all such data.