Along comes Metriport, which aggregates all of your quantified-self data in one place, and adds clever features like mood tracking, medicine tracking and journaling. All your data lives locally on your device to protect your privacy, and the app can find correlations in your data to help you become a better you.
Counting calories, summing steps, measuring your mood, proportioning your purchases, sizing your sleep span and enumerating the extent of your exercise — the quantified-self movement is becoming easier as our smartwatches, computers and other logging tools take some of the work off our hands. There’s a challenge, though: If you’re an obsessive tracker, you are running half a dozen apps that don’t talk to each other, and spotting patterns in the data can be hard. Does your period affect how sore you are after running? Does your mood affect how much you eat? Is there a correlation between how much coffee you drink or how much you walk and the quality of your sleep? Metriport can track it and lift the veil on patterns that hitherto were opaque.
“We see this as the Swiss Army knife of tracking apps. Gone are the days where you need seven different apps for tracking — one for mood tracking, one for journaling, one for period tracking, one for health — With Metriport we put it all together in one privacy focused-platform, built around the concept of your personal data dashboard,” says Colin Elsinga, co-founder at Metriport. “So far, we built Metriport with no outside investment. My friend Damon and I have known each other since middle school; we are both developers and we’ve had a passion for health and fitness — mental health, especially. We were both using a lot of different tracking apps, and found them quite limiting.”
The company is rejecting using ad tracking technologies, and stores all user data encrypted and locally on the device — even the developers can’t get to your data. The company also offers a premium plan, where it is possible to store your data on their servers.
“Our cloud backups enables you to keep your data in case you lose your phone or want to move to a new device. You can opt out of that if you don’t want your data on our servers, and in any case, it is all encrypted. No one will ever see your data except for you,” says Elsinga. “We’ve done a lot of things that may be at the expense of our own marketing — we want to be as transparent as possible with that to let people know they’re in full control here.”
The company is bootstrapped so far, but suggests that once their user number starts climbing, they may develop a plan that requires more cash and some venture funding.
“Growth is sort of a big goal for us, in terms of the actual product itself. We are working on a lot of exciting new features: In fact, we pushed an update live today that includes weather tracking. I have suffered from chronic migraines my whole life and now I can finally start tracking whether atmospheric pressure has an impact on my headache. I can just run the correlations insight and see whether it has a significant impact.”
It’s still early days for Metriport, but the team is off to an impressive start with its iOS and Android apps. In addition to all the standard, built-in measurements and data synchronizations, you can create your own custom measurements — severity of migraine, number of pancakes eaten, minutes of piano played — that can then be included in the correlations tracking.