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Free your health data from the tracking apps and devices!

· 5 min read
Ilian Sapundshiev
Ilian Sapundshiev
TagSpaces Core Team

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
  • Envisioned Solution
  • What is TagSpaces?
  • My "Health Data" Workflow
  • Supported platforms

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 ?
  • Use cases - File Management
  • Use cases - File Preview
  • Ok, we were here already ...
  • Use cases - File Tagging
  • File System as a Database
  • Sync Tagged Files Between Devices
  • Use cases - File Editing / Note-Taking / Evernote
  • TagSpaces as of v1.7

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
    • Organizing the data
    • Live Demo
    • Visualizing my weight
    • Adding new weight data entry
    • Conclusions

    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

      Firefox

      • Available as Add On

      Chrome

      • Available as Extension

      iOS

      • iOS release is coming soon

      The End

      Thank You! Questions?

      Ilian Sapundshiev @ilianste

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