Coda Health Tracker

Here’s Coda doc I’ve been using to track nutrition and vitals (blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate).

https://coda.io/@eduardo-cavazos/copy-of-health

And a long and rambly video demoing it (20 minutes):

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Wow @Eduardo_Cavazos, that’s impressive! :clap:

Dear @Eduardo_Cavazos,

Nice share, my daughter is rhythmic gymnastics player for the Bulgarian national team and also quite busy with measuring aspects like you do. I will check with her, to see if she wants to go one step further by recording the figures in a manner like you do.

Just some small feedback, suggestion and my vision:

  • When Coda gets an integrated way of building forms (I hope so, as I like the Airtable way), it will be much more easy to create forms for adding daily / hourly figures and or new menu’s or food records.
  • For entering data, you might want to check out the “detail view” and amend it to the type of info you want to add to your base. For the time being, the best solution to create a form like layout!
  • Grouping - yeah it’s rather annoying that the column headers disappear when scrolling, again a good reason to check out the detail view.
  • When your base start to become bigger and maybe at a certain point of time slower, you might consider to get figures for each subject on a monthly base and use them for calculations and move the records to an archive for your kind reference. This would mean that you have 1/30 of calculations to be executed on a monthly bases, or 1/90 on a quarterly basis.[optimization of your base] Of course you should check out the best way on how to get the most reliable results for certain figures. * On this subject I am doing still research, if this way of working has the benefits I see at this moment in time are real *
  • You mentioned already, collecting data on how you feel, what made you eat “wrong” would maybe nice to connect to the figures you currently measure. Awareness, if the first necessary to drive change!

Thank you being so generous to share this information, we all have " bad days" , showing that Coda can also be used for NON business data! :checkered_flag:

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@Eduardo_Cavazos Nice work man! :slight_smile:

I’ve made a similar app to manage pet nutritions (with whole foods or home diet) and health data :slight_smile:
i understand your consideration about performance, think that i have imported 3 different nutritional databases (8000+ foods) with all the nutrients value (100+), then users create diets based on those, and then they record those in a calendar, like you do :slight_smile:

What a fantastic adventure you’ve just started :heart_eyes:

Very cool doc @Eduardo_Cavazos! There are a ton of trackers out there in different tools, but I’m always curious if the tracker has caused you to change any of your nutrition habits over time?

Really thorough video walkthrough as well. We hear you on the column headers not being sticky when you scroll down on a grouped table around the 12:30 mark. Logging it with the product team!

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@Al_Chen_Coda,

Yes it has! At 9:21 in the video, I mention potassium to sodium ratio (K/Na) and how getting this higher has seemed to help lower my blood pressure numbers dramatically:

I now aim for at least 1:1 ratio but often will hit 2:1, 3:1, or higher.

I usually aim for 165 g of protein (1 gram per pound of body weight).

Calcium: 1000mg per day.

I used to gorge on one or two things which, this tracker clearly shows, can put the overall nutrient balance out of whack. Being mindful of the various macros helps me pick what to meat more intelligently.

@Mario,

Yes, I checked out your Pets Meal Maker page!

Is the idea that you’re prototyping the design in Coda first and then building an app based on that design experience? Or is the final app going to somehow depend-on/integrate-with Coda?

@Jean_Pierre_Traets,

Thank you for your extensive feedback!

I’ve considered having a variant of the View of Nutrition section which only shows perhaps the last 7 days (or less) to see if that helps with the performance of adding new food entries.

There are other approaches, including the one you suggest above. It’ll be interesting to see which approaches to optimization work well!

Ed

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@Eduardo_Cavazos This is a cool question! :grin:

The plan is to create an app that people can edit as they want! (you know, for politics, religion and nutrition people wants to be free as much as possible :slight_smile: )
I don’t want to give them a piece of software that can be improved just by the creator, my idea is to create a solid base with all the basic and some advanced feature, and then release this for free for the community enthusiast, that have the possibility to improve it and then share their edits.
For all the advanced nutritionist out there there will be a paid version that have more feature and, more importantly, they can edit their own app (you know that some guys [do you know anyone like this? :grin: ] prefer to see, understand and edit their nutritional algorithms :smiley: )
Coda allowed me to kill the cost of an app like that, that could have reasonably be around 50.000$, with a team of many people, thanks to coda it cost 30$ at month and i’ve made it “alone” in 1.5 years :slight_smile: that’s for all users :slight_smile:
I’d love to just use coda, but as you can imagine there are a lots of “rocks” in the path, just to share those i’ll list them:

  1. non editable UI - in coda you currently have limited power of creativity in doc design
  2. PMM it’s all based on the dashboard trick by mr. Danyliuk, that soon or later will become not the best way, if coda will ever add more than one column in the sections
  3. it deals with huge dataset, and (this is one of the best part for me) it is a multi-user doc, so every user data will be saved in the same doc! As now loading time is about 3/4 minutes on desktop, it’s fine for myself but not for any real user…off course api do not work because the doc is over 125 mb (just the DB reach around 120 mb…) so the doc is “oucasted” from the outer world
  4. coda does not support in any official way payment for using apps or any sort of pay-to-use plan (yet) - it seemed that some interest in this existed but @maria have not shared some plans yet (please!) - a Maker (as April 2020) is in no way supported in this type of doc creation and selling, the team seems to prefer to look at business feature improvements (like packs, new feature, template…), those probably take more money into balance but makes hard for non-business related Makers to “shine” in this “company-grey” environment…
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I had stopped using the health tracker partly because the responsiveness of the UI wasn’t great with very large tables.

I revisited the doc recently and am happy to see that coda has gotten a lot faster! So I’ve been actively using the doc again.

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