TraceWave
An AI Health Journaling App
Traditional Food Journaling Sucks
How to make it suck less:
Voice dictate your notes to your phone or smartwatch.
Automatically transcribe your notes and add timestamps
Take the huge messy journal and give to an AI LLM Chatbot (like Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to clean up the data, look for patterns, and present it back to you.
Great! How do I do this?
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TraceWave is the app I’ve been working on to make food journaling easy. Right now it has the voice dictation journal-taking function working. More features coming soon!
Use the contact form below to provide your email. I have to manually add people to the TraceWave Beta for iOS and Android.
My first prototype of this was made with Apple Shortcuts. If you are tech savvy enough to get that set up and don’t want to use my app you can download that here. -
Figure out what symptom you want to track (ie. stomach pains, gas, bloating, migraines, depression, anxiety)
Think through which lifestyle behaviors might affect how much of the symptom you experience. (If you are tracking tummy issues, track what you eat!)
Record, baby, record! More data is better than not enough. The AI can handle a 300 page journal.
Don’t worry about formatting, making grammar mistakes, or saying a wrong word. If a human would understand that you said a wrong word, the AI chatbots will understand too.
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I recommend generating a report after about 2 weeks worth of entries.
Go to Claude.ai and make an account.
Start a chat (make sure you are using 3.5 Sonnet and responses are set to normal, not concise).
Paste in my engineered prompt (see below).
Paste in your health journal.
Hit go!
Ask follow up questions as needed.
Make sure to verify all the analysis that it does - it can, and will make mistakes. However, it is very unlikely to make up or change journal entries that it references in its evidence. In my experience, it is more likely to miss pattern instances or find patterns even if they are weak.
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In my opinion, the most helpful part of this tool is that it helps you to see patterns in your symptoms and lifestyle behaviors that you may be missing due to cognitive biases.
For example, when I had acid reflux problems, I assumed that the need-to-swallow sensation that I was experiencing was how I felt acid reflux. Using the TraceWave method, I got the insight that my acid reflux was actually silent (as in I never feel direct symptoms such as heartburn). The swallow sensation is actually an after-effect of the esophageal irritation that happens many hours after I had the original acid reflux. I never considered this because my assumptions biased where I was looking for answers
Another example: my mom used this tool to figure out where her nausea was coming from. She has Celiac’s Disease, and so she assumed that her nausea was coming from the gluten somewhere. When she generated a report, it told her that her nausea symptoms were most likely coming from consuming dairy. She was looking for a gluten cause but in reality, it may be that this issue is completely seperate from her Celiac’s.
Sign up for iOS Beta Testing
I need your email to add you to the beta testing list in the apple app store. Once I add you to the list, you’ll get an email from the app store with a link to download the app.
Sign up for Android Beta Testing
Beta testing works a little different on Android devices. Once you sign up here I’ll send you a link to download the app.
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You are an AI health analyst specializing in identifying patterns in complex health data. Your task is to analyze a health log and identify potential correlative relationships between lifestyle behaviors and a specific symptom experienced by the user.
Here is the health log data to analyze:
<health_log>
{{HEALTH_LOG}}
</health_log>
Here is the symptom you should focus on analyzing:
<symptom_to_analyze>
{{SYMPTOM_TO_ANALYZE}}
</symptom_to_analyze>
Your objective is to identify potential correlations between lifestyle behaviors and the specified symptom.
To start, carefully read through the health_log and write out your intuition for what lifestyle behaviors contribute to the symptom_to_analyze. Start your intuition statement with <intuition> and end it with </intuition>.
<intuition>
(give you initial thoughts from the health log)
</intuition>
Next, create a detailed analysis. Follow these steps in your analysis. Please write out every step and start your analysis with a <analysis> tag and end with a </analysis> tag. It is okay if the analysis is very long.
<analysis>
1. Carefully read through the health_log and make a list of all the categories of lifestyle behaviors that you see. For example, "small meals", "medium meals", "large meals", "exercise", "dairy foods", "wheat-based foods", "TV watching", "Video Games" Etc. The categories that you come up with should reflect what is most commonly referenced in the health log.
Example:
Lifestyle Behavior Categories:
- Small Meals
- Medium Sized Meals
- Large Meals
- Dairy
- Meals with Eggs
- Sour Foods
- Fatty Foods
2. List out the timestamp at which the symptom_to_analyze occurs.
Example:
Symptom Occurrences:
- 11/5/24, 7:15 PM
- 12/1/24, 5:15 AM
- 12/15/24, 9:45 PM
- 12/18/24, 1:30 AM
3. List out each timestamp at which a symptom occurs and list all journal entries that preceeded each individual symptom timestamp within {{symptom_tracking_window}} hours.
Example:
11/5/24, 7:15 PM
- 7:05 PM: Pork Dinner
- 5:10 PM: Chips and salsa
- 2:05 PM: Big lunch
- 9:30 AM: Large glass of Juice
4. Re-write step 3, but now add a classification tag as was written in step 1 to each entry that classifies what category of lifestyle behavior it is.
Example:
11/5/24, 7:15 PM
- 7:05 PM: Pork Dinner [Large Meals] [Fatty Foods]
- 5:10 PM: Chips and salsa [Small Meals] [Sour Foods]
- 2:05 PM: Big lunch [Large Meals]
- 9:30 AM: Large glass of Juice [Sour Foods]
5. Re-write step 4, but add a counting tag after each classification type. Each time you see the same classification type, you should count [n+1]. Each different type of classification type should be storing its own variable.
Example:
11/5/24, 7:15 PM
- 7:05 PM: Pork Dinner [Large Meals]{1} [Fatty Foods]{1}
- 5:10 PM: Chips and salsa [Small Meals]{1} [Sour Foods]{1}
- 2:05 PM: Big lunch [Large Meals]{2}
- 9:30 AM: Large glass of Juice [Sour Foods]{2}
11/6/24, 8:45 PM
- 7:50 PM: Burrito Dinner [Large Meals] {3}
- 5:50 PM: Ice Cream Snack [Small Meals]{2} [Dairy]{1}
- 1:15 PM: Small lunch [Small Meals]{3}
- 11:30 AM: Glass of Kombucha [Sour Foods]{3}
6. Create a list of the most common lifestyle behaviors that preceeded symptoms from most common to least common. Discard any that have less than {{{significance_threshold}}} associations.
Example:
- [Large Meals]{3}
- [Small Meals]{3}
- [Sour Foods]{3}
7. Now, look back through the health log. If you find any occurances of a lifestyle behavior category from step 6, explicitly list out ALL of the journal entries that occured 2 entries before the found occurance of a lifestyle behavior category from step 6, and to EITHER {{symptom_tracking_window}}hrs later OR until you find an entry in reference to the symptom_to_analyze. If you find an occurance of the lifestyle behavior category that WAS NOT proceeded by the symptom_to_analyze in {{symptom_tracking_window}}hrs, subtract from the previous scores {n-1} until you get to {0} for that category, then you can stop. Please explicitly write out each time you find a category occurance that ISN'T proceeded by a symptom_to_analyze and your explicit counting. That way you don't accidentally miscount.
Example:
- 11/1/24, 4:15pm: Ate a big meal (no proceeding symptoms) [Large Meals]{2}
- 11/1/24, 6:40pm: Ate some popcorn (no proceeding symptoms) [Small Meals]{2}
- 12/5/24, 1:15pm: Ate a big beefy burrito (no proceeding symptoms) [Large Meals]{1}
If, as you re-examine the health_log for this step, you find occurances of a lifestyle behavior category that DID lead to a symptom_to_analyze, but was not counted or otherwise missed earlier in steps 3-5, it is okay to count it now and add it to the tally. Make a note that you caught this mistake.
</analysis>
Now, present your findings to the human in a clear, consise presentation of identified patterns, or lack thereof started with a <findings> tag, and ending with a </findings> tag. Consider any pattern with less than {{{significance_threshold}}} occurances to be insignificant.
<findings>
[Your clear, concise presentation of identified patterns or lack thereof]
</findings>
Important guidelines:
- Focus solely on patterns evident in the provided data. Do not include medical advice or interpretations based on external knowledge.
- Present your findings in a clear, easy-to-read format for human comprehension.
- Clearly differentiate between multiple patterns if more than one is identified.
- Write everything out as you think step-by-step. It is better to have too much writing rather than not enough.
FAQs
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This system is designed to look for correlations between lifestyle behaviors and the symptoms you want to track. Take a note every time that you experience a symptom, and take a note every time you do something in your life that could be relevant to the symptom.
For example, if you are tracking stomach pains, take note every time you experience the stomach pain, and describe what you eat/drink anytime you eat or drink something. If you believe stress may cause your stomach pains, note whenever you are feeling stress.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet can take in and process an approximately 300 page journal. So take too many notes rather than not enough! -
Right now it is all free. I haven’t figured out the exact monetization strategy yet, but eventually I will need to charge something for the AI reports feature at a minimum since it costs me money every time a user generates a report (AI companies charge per API call). It should cost around the same amount for what you’d expect from an app like this.
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In the future, it might be helpful to have access to real world journals so I can improve prompts and the backend software. If I implement a way to do this, I would have an opt-in system and anonymize the data.
For now, I don’t have any way of seeing your journal anyway since the app is running entirely on your phone.
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You don’t need to trust it. My prompt is designed to let you see into its thinking process and when it gives you a finding, it will back it up with notes from your journal entries. Always verify the AI’s findings.