Has anyone hired a personal analyst for their SQ data or heard of one for hire?

Hey everyone,

I’m in a position where I have a lot of great quantified data over a few years. I don’t have the time and accountability to do all the work needed art to uncover what I’d consider meaningful insights.

I’m hoping to hire someone to help so I can say something like the following and get insights “I want to optimize X about my health. Which behaviors, diet, etc are correlated to this, how much are each correlated, and which has causation?” Then they’d figure it out however they can using existing or new data.

Has anyone ever heard of someone you can hire like this?

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Hi David,

Nice coincidence, as this is a side project of mine.

I started Aug 19 with SQ and collect currently >150 daily data points, mostly manual (not from gadgets). Even though I am in training to a Data Scientist I prefered working with visualizations and filtering rather than building mathematical models. It also came to my mind to once build models which show the level of causation between all inputs, which lead to a certain final output. This was so far not a priority as I am still in the process of successfully tweaking the inputs to improve the outputs.

  • Is it about your own data or the anonymized data of multiple people?
  • Which subject modules would be the priority (e.g. body fat ratio, sleep quality, headache, wellbeing, cognitive power etc.)?

What format do you have your data in? Is it collected from devices or is it manually tracked in a spreadsheet for example?

I have it all in a Postgres database, which I built a custom app on that I also import third party data to like Gyroscope. So the reports could be SQL generated or exported to spreadsheets for analysis.

Very cool. Yeah it sounds like we’re in a similar position because this has been my side project too.

To answer your questions, it’s my own data here but the idea of having many anonymizes data points is interesting since you could see where you lay in proportion to the majority.

For my I’m trying to optimize cognitive power and wellbeing. So the inputs for that would be diet, intermittent fasting, mood, sleep, socializing, etc.

Very cool. I don’t own the full perfect truth, but I worked > 300 hours on my project, which makes me confident that I discovered some actionable insights. One of the surprises in my project was that impactful levers are often minor optimizations consistently executed through a longer period (compounding effect). I will DM you.

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I heard of hiring and thinking to get those services too…

If you post on r/slavelabour (it’s not literally slave labour, it’s just a place to hire people for tasks/be hired), you could probably find someone. I made a post a few months ago paying 5/hr for a virtual assistant and got literally 20 applications. I don’t think you’d have a hard time requesting someone and then being able to be picky enough to find someone up to your standards.

No matter how much data you think you have, it’s probably not enough for anyone to give you valid insights based on the data alone.

Also, good luck finding someone who is sufficiently knowledgeable about statistics and health, and who has nothing better to do than pour over your data :grin:

I think the best approach at the moment is consulting with a competent nutritionist, personal trainer etc, and using your data to check if any of the things they are suggesting have worked for you in the past (if you have the data), or how well they work for you going forward.

Thanks for the tips. Yeah haha I’d assume money would be the motivator here. I’m not that interesting haha :stuck_out_tongue:

Lots of analysis to be done before doctors need to see it. At least decompose time series and make a basic probability of causing list.

If you’re using Gyroscope, then it might be worth checking out their coaching program. Can’t vouch for it since I haven’t used it, but Anand has done a phenomenal job of building out the app so I’m sure it’s great

I do a similar analysis of my data. If you’re interested, you can read about it here.

Additionally, I have a webpage where you can upload a CSV and get a similar analysis. If you’re still looking for someone to do this for you, you can check it out.

Let me know what you think! I’m looking for feedback.

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This is incredible! Very similar to how I’d envisioned building with my own dataset. You’ve taken it to a much more advanced level and the programmatic narrative-based results are useful and easy to read.

You have a lot of the same datapoints I’m focused on too – mood, cold showers, martial arts, stimulants, sleep, etc. I’m curious – how have you tracked meat and sugar? I’ve been using a Levels/Freestyle Libre CGM to track my blood sugar but haven’t found an easy/accurate way to quantify things like meat.

I’ll adjust my data to upload later. Is the plan to build on top of this software more for others to use?

My diet metrics are quite rudimentary. It’s literally if I have eaten meat that day or not, and the same thing for something with added sugar that day (if I eat a cookie that’ll be a yes, while if I just have fruit I won’t count that in the sugar column).

I know that many people in the QS/biohacking world look for very accurate measurements of what’s going on in their body. I have nothing against that, but that’s not the kind of data I’m most interested in. I’m looking for more long-term trends & correlations, and ease of collecting this data. It’s the same reason I track my mood on a 1-5 scale as opposed to some of the more advanced data collection techniques out there. The ease of use pays off as over time I get enough data to draw meaningful insights.

Glad you think the blog post is interesting. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to upload your own data!

The plan is to put out some more QS writing on my data blog (I’m trying to get better at writing these days) and make some of the analysis that I do available to others via interactive notebooks on my page. If they resonate enough with folks in the QS + health-conscious community, then I’ll re-assess and see if it makes sense to bring a more cohesive application to market. But for right now I’m just enjoying writing more words than code for a change :slight_smile:

Yeah what you’re tracking seems to overlap pretty strongly with what I am too. I’m trying to look at long-term trends as well.

At first I didn’t know if the data upload stored it on a server so I was reluctant, but I just saw you updated the page to say browser-only.

Once I have some free time next I’ll drop file in there.

So many data aggregation apps but so few do any kind of actual analysis: existio firebase openhumans. That is all. Kaggle does have a number of time series notebooks. Maybe someone could just straight copy one. After adapting it without autoregressions.