Health Apps That Allow You To Collect Analyzable Data

Collecting data for the purpose of generating insights

As the time we spend on our mobile phones accumulates each consecutive year, you might assume that we have derived additional value from the time spent on our devices. Especially since we spend 90% of our time spent on mobile devices on applications.

However, the largest portion of time we spend on our mobile phones is devoted to applications that return no insights on our behavior and lifestyle, despite the pile of data that is collected.

Most particularly in the mobile health applications (mHealth Apps) market, the potential value to users is unprecedented if the user is able to collect and employ their data intuitively. Therefore, I shall disclose a number of mHealth Apps currently in the market that are designed in such a way that users can extract value from the data collected, such that you can start extracting actionable insights from the apps you employ!

The Applications

There’s a plethora of different mHealth Apps collecting user data that you can use to your own benefit. For the purpose of being concise and to the point, the following categories are elaborated on:

• Food
• Mood
• Mindfulness
• Sleep

Food Apps

The market entry of food products that are less harmful to animals and plants, while not losing out — at times even gaining — on nutritional values, displays the changing demand of consumers in developed countries.

Manifold nutritional applications have been developed since this market shift transpired, and the Diet & Nutrition Apps market is growing at unprecedented rates.

The predominant feature relating to data collection is the ability to log food consumption. This process has simplified over the past years for two main reasons:

• Food applications have enormous, expanding databases of consumable goods available in the marketplace;
• The process of logging consumed products has moved from manual entry to scanning products or similarly convenient methods

Therefore, applications such as ShopWell, Fooducate, MyNetDiary, FatSecret, and market leader MyFitnessPal have allowed users to create extensive food diaries of their consumption behavior. These apps allow you to easily capture daily consumption behavior, enabling you to grow a sizeable consumption archive that you can extract and analyze.

Mood Apps

The current strange and startling times that we live in due to the raging global pandemic have proven that our mental wellbeing is surprisingly vulnerable. As our mind moves along the sine wave from complete desolation to sheer excitement we have become increasingly aware of our mental states.

As a result, mental wellbeing applications have spiked in prior months. But besides being valuable to the present moment, they could potentially supply us with insights on our mood swings over time. Perhaps we could even scrutinize the causes of sudden meltdowns and soaring exhiliration.

To all intents and purposes, the evidence supporting the benefits of mental health applications is limited. Therefore, the collection of your data might be the key value here: analyzing the relation between your subjectively reported mental states and other collected data.

So what applications provide the option to collect and extract data? The mental health application market is booming and contains a myriad of sub-categories. Most promising in collecting useable data include What’s up?, IMoodJournal, Moodily, and Daylio.

• What’s up? allows you to keep a diary, rate feelings (1–10), track habits, and games with tons of questions. Lots of valuable data that can be collected and extracted.
• IMoodJournal allows you to log moods by selecting colors, record thoughts and experiences, add hashtags, or even add photos. There’s some unique data logging features in this app that you might contain valuable information!
• Moodily allows you to link moods with specific activities, and even add emoji’s to how you’re currently feeling.
• Daylio has many similarities to the other applications. It incorporates the features of Moodily, but also rate feelings (1–10) and add hashtags.

Mindfulness Apps

Instead of logging information, the main purpose of mindfulness apps is to prevent or solve both mental and physical health problems. However, these applications do collect the types and duration of (un)guided meditation courses you take.

As far as we know, all renowned mindfulness applications provide the option to receive your data logs. Applications such as Waking Up, Headspace and Calm have millions of users employing guided meditation and thereby generating valuable data. Why not extract the data and put it to your advantage?

Sleep Apps

Even though many people employ smartwatch functionalities to track sleep quality, several apps in the marketplace are similarly capable of tracking your sleep.

Are you curious about the occurrence and effect of snoring? Try out SleepCycle, which has a completely different approach to analyzing data quality using the sounds you make while sleeping. Or do you want to be more conscious of lucid dreaming and keep journals of your sleeping experiences? Check out Awoken.

The problem with these apps is that, considering what’s disclosed, they are less accurate in assessing sleep quality than wearables. Mobile sleep apps collect accelerometer (movement) measurements and rely on solely this data input to assess the quality of sleep.

Hence, due to the complexity of the process of sleep, the available applications are likely to be of lower value for data analysis than the other categories of mHealth Apps.

Obviously, there’s a plethora of other unconsidered categories of applications that allow you to collect analyzable data. Think of exercise applications such as Strava or MapMyRun, or communication applications such as Gmail or Slack.

Especially the categories indirectly related to health can prove to be of utmost value. Consider examining the relation between your daily meetings and your stress levels, or the correlation between the music you listen to and your subjective mood.

Regardless, the interest of consumers in analyzing the data collected by employed applications has attracted the attention of mHealth App developers to improve upon the functionality to extract user data.

Let’s hope that the next generation of mHealth App developers will be increasingly data-conscious and allow users to investigate their behavior patterns more intuitively.