Ask HN: Idea feedback on personal analytics

The idea is to build an app to vent your thoughts. In today's world, everyone is in a constant fight with the monkey mind inside of us. We live life on an autopilot mode, struggling with our thoughts, and marred our intelligence.

I think the solution would be a cognitive platform that you can talk to daily by telling it whatever emotion that builds up, and the platform would ask questions based on your inputs.

The platform would provide you with detailed personal analytics on a day to day basis and would help you to understand your emotional state and map it to events that happened.

This solution is not a Therapist app but useful as a self-discovery tool.

What is your view on such a service?

15 points | by metroan 1768 days ago

4 comments

  • rseanlindsay 1768 days ago
    It's natural -- in human terms -- to have feelings you want to share, and to be initially attracted to a service that facilitates that.

    But there are existing "venting" solutions like Blind and more constructive (yet still anon) solutions for engagement surveys (TinyPulse, CultureAmp, etc)...

    Further, there are tons of apps for daily journaling/sentiment capture...

    So my "view" is...why yet another solution? what is unique in the approach? what problem is this actually helping me solve?

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    • metroan 1768 days ago
      Thanks for your insights. I think the idea is more of a marriage between thoughts and Google analytics. To understand how the thoughts pattern impacts different areas of one's life.
  • nfoz 1768 days ago
    Any recommendations for mind-mapping (or really, just graph-drawing-and-rearranging) software? I'd be interested in that as a tool for organizing and reevaluating thoughts and sorting out patterns, whether it's regarding self-analysis or some other puzzle that could use untangling and exploratory visualization.
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    • metroan 1768 days ago
      FreeMind is a free tool that serves this purpose.
    • dewey 1768 days ago
      Mindnode if you are in Mac or iOS
  • verttii 1768 days ago
    I'm actually already building a service like this. It's only for myself and for my friend but the idea is to ask chains of questions daily.

    With enough time passing you can start making statistical analysis of your own data for insights about your life.

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    • metroan 1768 days ago
      That's great. Share it when you are ready.
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      • verttii 1768 days ago
        Actually it only supports having a handful of users now and the database is not encrypted. I don't think I'll ever publish it because it's certainly not a product comprehensive enough for a public release.
    • notopygos 1768 days ago
      loop on f-droid <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.isoron.uhabits/> is similar to this, you can ask yourself questions at set time intervals. It is a habit tracker and plots the data as you go, you'll like it.
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      • verttii 1768 days ago
        Thanks, it does seem interesting!

        It seems there is no server implemented yet, not sure if it'll even rely on one. I've almost written mine already so I'll stick to my solution for personal needs.

        I'm also making my service a bit more "intelligent", meaning it'll ask conditional questions based on your answers to previous questions. I guess sort of like the author of this thread is planning on doing.

  • bwb 1768 days ago
    I would worry people are not that deep, and if they are they have a diary :). I am rather negative on people's ability to pull deep, but if you can help them do that it is huge, and a hard issue.