Self-tracking is good for you but boring. This is not an opinion, this is a scientific fact. It is proven that self-tracking helps you both to know yourself better and to help you change your behaviour towards a goal. It is also proven than most people stop self-tracking quickly, from a few days to a few weeks. Knomee was created to tackle this challenge, and it is a hard one.

The only thing that makes this self-tracking worthwhile is learning about yourself. This is why we selected “self-tracking with sense” as our motto. We came up with the quest idea for two reasons. First, a “quest” is “indeed a quest to know yourself better” and to see if your “causal hypothesis” happens to work. In many cases, using Knomee is a way to see if doing some particular effort is “worth it”. Second, a causal diagram is a powerful tool to orient the machine learning and statistical analysis. It makes the problem of “making sense from your data” easier and helps us keep everything on your phone (hence our guarantee of full privacy).

Quests don’t last: you formulate a hypothesis, you learn (or you don’t) from it and you move to other things. We have made it easy to add and drop quests to Knomee. Our usage statistics show that this is not properly understood yet. Many users start with the pre-defined quests and never venture to create their own. This is a shame since it is unlikely that those pre-defined causal diagrams apply to you.

Quests are meant to be shared: the future of Knomee is to make it easier to share successful quests with others (sharing the model, the causal diagram, not your data). In a reciprocate way, it would be nice to be able to look at quests that have been successful for people who have the same “target” goals. For instance, although everyone is different, it would be nice to have access to a collection of successful quests from people who tried to improve the quality of their sleep. Currently, sharing is possible but cumbersome: you send the model/quest description to a friend through email … and she/he may import it. The quest library is another way to benefit from quest sharing but this feature is still in an infancy stage.

You may wonder why no other tracking app is using quests. This is because we take our mission “self-tracking with sense” seriously. It is clear that it is hard to make sense with one single tracking dimension. You know this already if you are using a tracking app or if you are looking at your health app on your iPhone. At first seeing all this data and this nicely shaped charts is exciting, but you get rapidly bored because there is not much value there. The chronology (looking for weekly, daily and hourly patterns) is the most interesting part, but only a few apps do a decent job at it. If you “self-track” regularly, you will notice that the interesting questions arise from the combination of factors. There are a few Knomee competitors that upload all data in the cloud to search for any interesting combination or pattern. We already said that using quests (simple causal diagrams) makes the analysis simpler and suitable for a “device-only” solution (everything on your phone) but there is another reason for using quests. You are in charge, you know better than anyone what questions are interesting for you