alt Hacker NewsA counter example:
I've been wearing an Apple Watch for close to 10 years. I've tracked my weight as well along those years but nothing crazy like OP. The Apple watch tracked plenty.
I had some strange symptoms and two doctors insisted I had a weak heart and potential heart failure. This was shocking! Turns out I do have a really "weak" rhythm, but heart failure is when your heart is progressively getting worse in it's pumping. I don't even remember which metric he looked at in my Apple health - but basically my heart has always been this way. A doctor looking at a single data point might think I have abnormally low blood pressure/heart rate, but if I've had this for 10 years with no change, the medical assessment is very different - it means nothing. Sometimes boring data is exactly what you need. For this reason, I will probably always wear an Apple watch (or equivalent) moving forward.
Data can feel useless for 10 years until one day it becomes critical. The benefit is spiky and uneven.
Replies
My first car had a broken speedometer. It was a "hand" style like a clock. Instead of moving to the speed, it would spin 365 degrees. The faster the car went, the faster it would spin. Turns out, I acclimated to it and generally knew what speed i was going (relatively speaking).
The lesson, I think, is everything is relative. Even a dashboard with flawed data that is "consistent" can highlight anomalies. And often, that's all you really need out of them. (Or the lack of anomaly)
> Data can feel useless for 10 years until one day it becomes critical. The benefit is spiky and uneven.
Not sure if in your case the data was critical, since the doctor likely would have just had you wear a monitor for a while after to come to the same conclusion.
This is the obvious "benefit" of hindsight. Yes, you accidentally had access to data that provided historical patterns you exactly could use.
But, for anyone who does, there is another 1000 who do not when something hits them: many illnesses develop gradually, and all of our tests (thousands of blood tests, scans and imaging tech...) would benefit from having historical data when we were "ok".
Similarly, you probably did not have more data than what Apple provided to help narrow the problem you still had, right?
And if everyone was put under so many tests, we'd actually be "solving" a bunch of non-issues for people over-reacting to small deviations from "normal" range.
Apple watch helps you with a few parameters — not to be discounted — but I don't really see it as a counter.
Collecting data is great.
But I see people start min-maxing these numbers as a replacement for big picture health goals.
From the outside, I see someone spending a lot of time focusing on numbers while they are actually regularly stressed, who doesn’t get good sleep, and has somewhat bare minimum exercise.
Collecting data is great but don’t sink so much effort into it until you have a problem.
So what happened with your symptoms?
But you didn’t spend hundreds of hours on it, so when it did happen to be useful it seemed like an outsized benefit.
I would wager that for most people, most data about themselves will be useless and not worth collecting.
Of course you can’t know what data will be useless or not, so unless the cost of collecting it is minimal or nil (wearing a smart watch, writing down your weight each day/week), it’s probably not worth it.
Spending hundreds of hours to build a solution to capture all data about yourself to find interesting patterns has a huge assumption baked into it: that there are interesting patterns to find.