Insightful analytics are what we are all after with investments in Big Data. Even in personal use, we create and must make sense of a lot of data — so why not apply what we do at home to our work?
Integrating for Fitness
As summer approaches, I’ve been looking at how I can bring various tools together and bring about some healthy integration in my life. For the past two years, I’ve been gathering a good amount of data about my diet and fitness routine. From daily food logs into the MyFitnessPal app, to wearing a heart rate monitor during my runs, to keeping a workout log, I gathered a good amount of information. From that, I learned a lot about ways to improve my health. Now that I’ve hit a plateau, I’ve finally taken the leap to integrating all my tools to get some deeper insights.
The Full Picture
I bought a FitBit Flex wristband and the FitBit Aria scale to track my workouts and automate my weigh-ins. Fitbit’s scale is connected to the Internet via wi-fi, so when you weigh in it automatically updates the dashboard in the MyFitnessPal app. It makes my weigh-ins much more consistent than in the past. And the FitBit, in addition to tracking my steps and heart rate, has added a new source of data for me: tracking my sleep. From this, I became aware of how my lack of sleep was affecting my weight. (It was a total blind spot until now.) Together, these tools have made my health data consistent and have shown me a clearer, more detailed picture of my overall health.
My experiment in bringing healthy integration into my life has brought about lots of good changes, but, more than anything else, it’s brought the kind of awareness that only comes about with connecting the dots. That’s essentially integration’s benefits in a nutshell: bringing together a bunch of independently useful snapshots to form a richer perspective of the past and present so you can shed light on the future. Integrating all my health information also reminds me that, just like in business, my analysis is only as good as my inputs. Namely, there’s no gadget to replace good food, exercise, and sleep. Good decisions, matched with good integration, makes for a healthy business diet.
For more on how to easily integrate your systems for a healthier business diet, read about TIBCO Cloud Bus.
