Recently I gave a talk on the quantified self meetup in Munich. In this talk I presented how TagSpaces can be used to manage your health data. Please find here the slides from this talk:
And here is the complete presentation transcript:
TagSpaces
- Free your health data from the tracking apps and devices!
- (or how to use your file system as a database)
- by Ilian Sapundshiev @ilianste Munich QS Meetup at [20140320]
Table of Content
Motivation
- Issues with health / quantified self data:
- many apps on many devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops)
- many intelligent devices (smart watches, bluetooth scales, wristbands)
- many health web portals
- all this leads to a segmentation of your data
- your data is mostly vendor locked
- and you don't really know how your data is used
Envisioned Solution
- What I really needed:
- Universal hub for health data management
- Cross device sync and portable data
- Abilities for visualization and analysis
- No Backend ->No Login -> No Cloud
What is TagSpaces?
What is TagSpaces ?
- it is open source and extensible platform for personal data management
- it let you organize, tag and browse your local files, photos and documents on many platforms.
- project initiated in 2013 by me
official website: tagspaces.org
source hosted on github.com/uggrock/tagspaces
- build with HTML5, JS, Cordova, Node-Webkit
Use cases - File Management
- create files (plain text, html, markdown)
- create directories
- rename files
- move files (drag&drop)
- delete files
Use cases - File Preview
- TagSpaces can open over 50 different file types such as:
- Images (PNG, BMP, JPG, GIF), Videos and Audio (MP3, OGG)
- Documents (PDF, ODF, ODT, ODS, ODP, MARKDOWN)
- Sourcecode (C, Java, C++, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, XML)
Ok, we were here already ...
Use cases - File Tagging
- TagSpaces uses the file name for saving the tags
- tags are saved after the following schema:
- file title [tag1 tag2 tag3].extension
- example: img_2343 [USA beach miami].jpg
- example: meeting [bmw 20140214 john].html
File System as a Database
- No database locking
- Findabilty - with the search capabilities of your operating system
- Easy to synchronize between devices (just work in a dropbox folder)
Sync Tagged Files Between Devices
- Dropbox offers a great way to sync tagged files across multiple devices
Use cases - File Editing / Note Taking / Evernote
- TagSpaces can also edit some text file types
- HTML
- Markdown
- Text Files
- Sourcecode (C, Java, C++, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, XML)
TagSpaces as of v1.7
My "Health Data" Workflow
Collecting the data
- taking screenshots from your after every measurement
- using the export functionality of your device (if available)
- e.g. my scale has usb port so I can export all the data in CSV
- taking photos of the device (if it shows the result of the measurement)
Organizing the data
- Once a week collect all the screenshots / photos
- Organize and tag those screenshots in 10 minutes
- Convert your CSV to tagged files (easy with scripts)
Live Demo
Visualizing my weight
- Feature currently in development
Adding new weight data entry
- Feature currently in development
Conclusions
- You can experiment with many kind of devices and apps
- While letting you stay not vendor locket
- Not suitable for measurements happening to often
- It is still heavy manual approach
- It needs optimizations, eventually OCR for automatic tagging
Supported platforms
Windows
- Native 32bit Application
Mac OS X
- Native 32bit Application
Linux/Ubuntu
- Native 32bit and 64bit Applications
Android
App available in the Google's Play Store
Firefox
- Available as Add On
Chrome
- Available as Extension
iOS
- iOS release is coming soon