Knomee assign a score (from zero to 100%) to each quest, that is displayed on the main screen in the upper right corner. If you click on this number, you access the quest score view which is illustrated with the image above. Here you see a quest with a score 68%. To follow-up on the previous post, this is a quest whose target is “fitness” (that is measured using labels who are unique to the user of this quest), while the three factors are respectively the amount of ingested fat, ingested cereals and the rest heart rate as measured by the Apple Watch.

This score is made of three parts :

• The quantity of data : a third of the score tells you if you have accumulated enough data to get significant insights. Depending on your data, Knomee will wait until you have between 30 and 60 measures to give you a high score on this part. In the example that is show in the picture above, you can see in the green box that this first component is 100% (there is enough data, as told by the comment)

• The insight score : this tells you if Knomee has found interesting insights using the three factors, or the time, day and location of the measure. If this sub-score is high, you will see that the relevant factors are coloured. In this case, “fat” and “cereal” are positively correlated, so they are coloured as green. The “chart view” is where you will get more details, but if you click on one of the factors, you will get a short insight summary as a forecast. In this example, the strength of the insights is not very strong so the sub-score is 25%.

• The forecast score : this says if Knomee is able to forecast your successive measures well. Recall that whenever you enter a new measure, Knomee pre-position the sliders to its “guessed” value. This is mostly offered as a way to make the app faster and more playful, but Knomee keep the score on its forecasting capability. In this example, Knomee is on average 10% away from the actual value, which translates into a good third subscore of 77%. A good forecasting score is a sign of Granger-causality.

At first you will simply look at the score on the main user screen (the measure capture screen is the home screen), but after a while you will probably venture to this quest score screen to understand your quest score better. You can see that the rest of the screen displays a description of your quests, with colors to attract your attention on the relevant factors.

What does my score tell me?

• A score below 50% says that either your quest is too young … or that it is not very significant. There may be many explanations, but most often it means that your causal diagram hypothesis is false. Put more bluntly, it means that your factors do not seem to have much influence on your target. As said repeatedly, this is a critical feature: Knomee helps you distinguish between your “hunches” and “data-supported causation schemes”. As it turns out, we are often “fooled by randomness”.

• A score over 70% says the opposite: your “causal hypothesis”, i.e., your quest, is definitely interesting. By navigating through the various screens, you are likely to find interesting insights. If you have allowed Knomee to send you notifications, you will receive one of these insights daily.

• A score in between means that your quest is interesting but there are probably many other factors influencing your “target”.

Knomee has no ambition to know you or to understand you. It is your job to understand yourself better through this self-tracking and these insights. The ambition of Knomee is to help you craft interesting self-tracking quests. The score is a great tool to help you during this journey. You should try quests and drop those whose score stay low. You should play with factors to see if some new factor improves or decreases your score. There are three stages of using Knomee:

• At first, play with the default quests to get familiar with the app. Although we tried to select three quests with a broad range of interest, you are likely to get bored quickly or to say “this is not for me”. Remember that there is a “quest library” so you can substitute many other quests to start this first learning stage.

• Knomee starts to be interesting when you define your own quest. We have tried to make this as simple as possible, and we shall continue to work on our design. Knomee is not “another self-tracking app”, it is “your own tracking app”. It takes five minutes to define a new quest, and then you can enjoy a tool that is unique to you. However, our experience suggests that you need to play with the existing quests (stage 1) before moving to stage 2.

• There is only a finite amount of self-knowledge that your will extract from a given quest. After a delay that varies from a few weeks to a few months, you will be done with that quest. There are two ways to keep using Knomee : try a new quest, randomly, once in while … or continuously optimize your quest by changing the factors, the scales, or the data sources (switching from declarative values – when you input your data- to automatic values – when the value is read from a connected device through HealthKit).

Once you reach this third quest, you should consider sharing your quest with others. The screen shown above has an “envelope” button that allows you to share a recommendation through email. In the future we plan to make quest sharing simpler and more seamless.