lifecentral Overview

Here, you can learn all about lifecentral and how it can help you and all of society improve its health. This page contains an overview of lifecentral. Other topics are available at the following links:

• Making entries
• • Getting started with entries
  • Tips and tricks
  • Guidelines for submitting new entries
• Generating reports
• • Overview of the three types of reports
  • The entry frequency report
  • The correlations graph
  • Regression analysis
• Sharing
• • Sharing, permissions, and settings
  • Viewing another user's data
  • Privacy policy/Contact us
• Other
• • lifecentral: a case study in highly AJAX-oriented symfony development

What is lifecentral?

lifecentral is a centralized storage location to record everything one does, eats, and feels, every day. Periodically, users enter data into the database using a graphical, Web-based interface. After enough data is collected, typically one month, reports can be generated based on the data that they have entered. The reports allow relationships between activities, foods, moods, and more, many of which were previously unknown, to be revealed. Usage is free to everyone.

Discovering correlations

Complicated relationships exist between our health, foods, and activities. The purpose of lifecentral is to discover these correlations, many of which are far too complicated to discover without the help of computer software to help us analyze them. For example, a lifecentral user may have been suffering from sleepiness that tends to occur at certain times, but he previously shrugged it off because nothing could be done about it. After recording his daily activities, however, he may discover that he almost always becomes tired two hours after eating chocolate. When he stops eating chocolate and continues to analyze his activities, he discovers that his previously intractable sleepiness has vanished. Without computing power available to analyze the large number of variables in his life, this user might have never considered any relationship between sleepiness and chocolate at all.

Medical records for health

Currently, no large-scale medical database exists that allows researchers to analyze the effects of lifestyle on health conditions. Medical records are fragmented, with one patient's paper folders stored across multiple doctors in every city where he lived. Most importantly, medical records only describe sickness, and not health - few doctor visits are made when a patient is completely healthy. Lifestyle has a huge impact on our physical and mental health, and doctors don't have the time to record what you eat and do every day.

When many profiles are analyzed across specific geographical regions, ages, genders, races, and other important data, patterns emerge that lead to new treatments. Is it possible that prostate cancer risk could be reduced by 50% just by drinking tea? Probably not, but no study exists to disprove that theory. Lifestyle data allows medical professionals to quickly determine what to research, and if enough people participate, lives might just be saved.

Best of all, medical research is interested in aggregate, anonymized data, so we will never disclose any person's individual personal information or even any individual person's entries without his or her consent.

Life record

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to look back years from now and remember what you were doing at any specific time? Have you ever forgotten how you spent your birthday, or wedding anniversary last year? Or, has the family asked you to host another Christmas party, and you want to figure out whether you have actually slacked off on the hosting duties as your relatives claim? lifecentral allows you to easily review your life history at any time to find out precisely what you were doing any time in the past.

Read more

The top of this page provides links to additional pages that describe how to use lifecentral in a more detailed manner. Scroll back to the top or click the "Back to top" link to continue.

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