Healthstored.com - polling for interest and looking for early access users

Hi all,

I am in the final stages of making an all-in-one online health-tracking space (accessible through website and Android app), and am looking for some kindly folks to give some feedback and get early access.

You can see more here:

https://www.healthstored.com

You can sign up on the site for updates, and I’ll send out more info when the site is ready (soon!). Feel free to ask any questions here too.

To give a brief summary here:


healthstored is here to help you and your loved ones get control of every aspect of your health. Using our long list of trackers, you can record, store and analyze as much as you need, quickly, easily, securely and with privacy.

There are 17 categories for you to choose from:

Alcohol
Blood pressure
Blood sugar
Body measurements
Cholesterol
Diet
Drugs
Exercise
Headaches
Heartrate
Height
Menstruation
Peak flow
Respiratory rate
Sleep
Smoking
Weight

From the more common things like weight and exercise to categories like headaches and menstruation, you can now do it all in one place.

You can view your records with:

Tables - Easy-to-use, editable
Interactive graphs, with the ability to compare data across your categories
Reports showing interesting and useful analyses of your data

You can also track your loved ones. At healthstored you can track up to five others, with customisable category lists and data analysis for each of them.

Data privacy is very, very close to our hearts. You can rest assured we won’t share your data with outside advertising, insurance or analytics groups. Your data is here and here only.

The aim is for healthstored to be a membership site with a (very cheap) yearly subscription. We’re in the early stages of figuring the exact amount out, but we really want it to be cheap, around $20/year. There would be a free offering too, with some features removed.

We also want our users to play a vital role in defining the future of healthstored. There will be feedback forms around the site to easily send us any comments you have.

Sounds useful in principal, but it’s hard to judge the true usefulness of a service (and get an idea how it compares to existing apps) just from a list of features. So it would be nice to have a short demo (a screencast or even just blog post) where you use the app to do something interesting!

Hey ejain. Thanks for your time and the ideas. I’ve been considering a blog to showcase a few things (some work-in-progress screens, graphs, my general startup struggles/excitement/misery etc) and I’m looking into that now. I’ve been using my site privately for ages now, tracking what I need (I personally track alcohol, drugs, exercise, headaches, sleep and weight). There could be some good material there. Whatever can help me get people interested! I’ll update here if that happens.

I checked out Zenobase, and you have some great ideas there. Our sites are similar in some ways (this is honestly a coincidence!). I really like the customizable buckets, allowing people to track whatever they like. A lot of possibilities. Is there any way to add custom fields to the buckets, beyond the list in ‘Default’?

I initially started my site as a means for me to track my headaches (I get ALOT) because I didn’t like the current app selection (and online was worse). Then I got enthusiastic, things kind of exploded and before I knew it I had 16 other categories :slight_smile: By the way, spending all day staring at a screen for months on end making an app to help with headaches isn’t a good way to stop headaches…

If I’d seen Zenobase before I started, I might have just used that. That’s one of the reasons why I ask about custom field lists in Zenobase. I’s like to have a ‘pain’ field from 1-10 (that’s how I set mine up). I guess I could use a ‘percentage’ or similar.

That would be great. Speaking at a local QS group might be another option :wink:

I can spend an hour using a service and still not see how it is useful, or watch someone else use it and see the value in 5min.

There is also a “rating” field in Zenobase that stores a value from 0 to 100, shown as 1-5 stars (should add support for half stars). Instead of adding custom fields, create separate “events” with different tags.

You can enter data on the website, but there is also an API that a custom headache tracking app could use to send data to Zenobase to let their users investigate questions such as “does staring at the screen (tracked e.g. with RescueTime) worsen my headaches”?

There are quite a few self-tracking services (with varying degrees of flexibility and usability), and it sounds like you’re familiar with at least some of them. It’s good to have some awareness and be able to explain the advantages (and disadvantages) of your service for different use cases!

[quote]Data privacy is very, very close to our hearts. You can rest assured we won’t share your data with outside advertising, insurance or analytics groups. Your data is here and here only.[/quote]How do you guarantee this? You might take VC money and lose the control of your company. Do you have legal contracts in the user agreements in place to prevent this?

Sounds like a bad design choice. Different users want to track different data and there are a lot more different kinds of data that users want to track then 17.

Another thing you haven’t spoken about is data export. I won’t use a new service for QS data if it doesn’t let me export the data I put into it.

[quote=“Christian_Kleineidam, post:5, topic:963”]
How do you guarantee this? You might take VC money and lose the control of your company. Do you have legal contracts in the user agreements in place to prevent this?[/quote]

Presumably this will be formalized in their privacy policy? That, plus the smaller user base which results from charging a subscription fee should ensure that the company won’t be able to get VC funding anyway :slight_smile:

Hi Christian. Thanks for the feedback. As ejain said, the privacy policy will lay all that out.
For me privacy is one of the main anchors of the site. I have no plans to sell the data at all. I use the site for my tracking too, and I’d like my data to stay private.

I only copied a small bit of the landing page blurb in my initial post, which covers your questions in greater detail. If you want to check that out (here), go for it. I’ve tried to address them below too.

You’ll see that the user can control their data in a number of ways. They can export and delete their data as they like. Exports are in the form of a CSV, which should be accessible for everyone. If you want to delete your whole account, no problem.

Also, I agree on the 17 categories thing. I have a list as long as my arm of other categories I want to add, but I had to stop at some point to get something ready for people to test. I have asked users to submit any categories they want via feedback forms too, and I’ll try my best to get them in. The site is focusing on health, so any categories added would be in that sphere.

I agree that charging a (small :)) subscription is going to keep the userbase smaller than it could be, but that has benefits too, like keeping the data easier to manage. The aim is to have a free option too, with some features removed, and some ads. The ads wouldn’t be using your data in any way.

Also, not sharing the data with external groups helps us avoid some legal issues which could be coming for other sites that do. Avoiding that whole hornet’s nest is only a good thing!


ejain - I’ve also taken your advice and added a blog to the site. It’s quite basic at the moment, with only one post outlining why I started (what would become) healthstored in the first place. If you click here you should find it. I plan to add use-cases, development stories, my personal findings while using it, etc. Let me know if you see any problems!

On the QS speaking thing, I signed up a few months back to a QS group here in Montreal, but I haven’t seen any actual events organised yet. Maybe I should take the initiative on that.

Interesting, just subscribed to your blog… I’d suggest contacting the organizers of your local meetup group (there should be a form for that), sometimes a small push is needed :slight_smile:

Sorry to hear about your headaches. That sucks. Hope you are able to get relief!

I use an app called rTracker to track all kinds of stuff, including frequency of headaches. Looking forward to seeing your concept come together!

There’s another app similar in many ways to rTracker called Quantid - http://www.quantid.co/

Dan - I’ve been headache-free for 9 days now, which is an amazing feeling. Thanks for your concern. I checked out rTracker, and it does indeed look useful. I’ve been on Android for a few years, which might be how I missed it.

QuantifiedBob - thanks for pointing out Quantid. As with rTracker, it was new to me and it looks like it could have helped with my personal tracking needs too. It has some nice features, like the social aspect, and custom metrics. I wonder if it allows data export? I’m on android so can’t check it out so easily.

One thing that healthstored does is store data centrally, so it’s accessible from your browser or your phone (android app only at the moment). The app is the best way to add a record when you need, and you can get more value from your data with the in-depth analysis offered via the website on a larger screen. And the data isn’t shared with any external groups (I’ll keep stressing that :)). You can also easily track other people in your life in the same account, like your child or an elderly person in your care. A few distinctions, but (I hope) they help to differentiate healthstored.

…or (maybe one day) through a public API, too? :slight_smile:

It’s definitely on the list of wants. Once I’ve made some progress with this work mountain in front of me, I’ll investigate further.

Thanks to everyone so far who has taken the time to read this thread and/or go to the site to check it out.

We’re making progress with the sign-ups and can’t wait to move forward. You can still go to the site to sign up for updates (no obligation!) so if you’re interested, go to https://www.healthstored.com to check it out.

I’m proud to announce that healthstored is live! Follow the link below to sign up now.

https://www.healthstored.com

The site is only accepting a limited number of new users for now, so make sure to head over and sign up before all the spots are taken. As another incentive, all new users are being offered an extended trial period of 90 days (normally 30).

It’s been a long road to get to this point, and there are still a million ideas being worked on. Functionality is being added to the site all the time, so keep an eye out for new bits and pieces showing up.

The Android app is also available, allowing you to track yourself on the go.

I’d love to hear what you think via the feedback forms, or here on the forum. Any feedback, good or bad, is welcome!