Hello everyone. After having experienced two problems both as an end user trying to self-track or a software developer trying to make sense of my data, I’m exploring the idea of a platform that functions as a data hub for our self-data. By having all necessary integrations it will collect data from measuring devices/sources and provide all these data through an API to any developers that want to consume and analyse them.
Problems to solve:
end user owns all the data in one place
end user determines which app has what access to to what data
developers/scientists can focus on building software only consuming ready data through the API
device/source makers can focus on building the best way to collect data
I’m trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, so I would be grateful if you could enlighten me if something similar exists, or I could build on, or collaborate with. From what I’ve seen now, all efforts that aggregate data for some reason want to also provide the value out of it (visualisation, advices etc) instead of enabling all the developers out there to come up with their own solutions - like Apple did with the AppStore and opened their iPhone I/O to developers to figure out what to do with it.
It does do visualisation and stuff so it’s not bare-bones approach you may be looking for, but it is completely accessible by API, so you could create your own interface to it if you liked.
It’s still early days and it’s a waiting list at the minute, but if you wanted to try it out I can take you off the waiting list straight away if you like).
Very correct David, Apple is trying to do that but there is a big conflict of interest that doesn’t let them solve for the user first, they solve for their ecosystem first, therefore not being 100% open
You should be able to create an account at beta.lytiko.com now. I haven’t published any documentation for the API currently, but it’s a GraphQL API and I should be able to answer any questions, or auto-generate some if needed.
In terms of how lytiko works, essentially everything is a time series - one of five types depending on what you are tracking - and there are also specialised tools for tracking food (currently present) and soon time and money too.
I currently track the usual QS stuff - weight, waist, body fat etc. - but most things can be represented in lytiko. I track the pattern of certain dreams in lytiko, followers on twitter and GitHub, my daily step count, and other stuff. It’s still pretty early though, and I’m very keen for feedback.
Hi! I’m working on something like this. It’s not exactly a ‘platform’, but I do treat is as a personal ‘hub’ for my data:
The basic idea is
data exports run separately and result in raw data on your disk (e.g. json/csv/sqlite/whatever). Ideally you’ll reuse existing projects for retrieving data, GDPR exports, etc.
HPI handles data processing and normalizing, again ideally relying on existing repositories if they exist
as a result you get a nice Python API for your data
it’s very extensible and flexible, you can leverage all the existing software to process/visualize/transform the data
Responding to the topic starter:
end user owns the data: yes it’s all on your computer
end user determines which app has what access: possible to restrict with Docker
can focus on building software only by consuming data through the API: yes, that’s the goal!
device/source makers can focus on building the best way to collect data: sadly not something I personally can influence, but my approach helps in the sense that the device developers don’t have to write apps to visualize data etc., as long as they provide some way to export the data, I’m happy.
A couple of my projects that are already using this HPI thing as an API:
The ‘downside’ of having this as a Python library is that it requires somewhat nontrivial (at least for non-programmers) setup, e.g. running your own data export scripts, messing with Python code at times etc. But given enough time and effort, it’s totally possible to extend this to make more accessible to more people.