Smart Diary Suite: “Impress with Simplicity”

Posted March 9, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi 

While Project HealthDesign can’t officially endorse a particular product, I wanted to draw your attention to one we came across that incorporates a number of features and functions the project promotes. Smart Diary Suite v. 4 Medical Edition is a software application from Australia consisting of a password-protected calendar diary enhanced by graphs, reminders via email, a virtual community, and other features.

What’s most notable about it?

• It’s designed for patients and the data they themselves generate. So you can record and plot a variety of types of information (or “observations of daily living”–ODLs) including diet, exercise, and sleep.
• It creates useful new knowledge. Rather than just helping you to record data over time, the application provides analyses of how different types of data may influence one another. What impact does your diet have on your mood? Does sleep impact your ability to exercise? The software can help you to discover patterns through visual interfaces.
•  It’s customizable. You can adapt it to fit any types of observations you care about. Smart Diary Suite categorizes factors that impact your life and health according to three groups: body (physical sensations, symptoms), mind (mental state, including moods), and matter (the external world–including weather, humidity and the like). Within these areas, choose or create any factors you want.

• It integrates into the rest of your life. You are encouraged to use the calendar, notes, and other functions to record and integrate facts not necessarily related to your health–like social events, reminders about errands, etc. along with information that pertains specifically to health or encounters with the health system, like doctor’s appointments.
• It’s simple. Colorful visual interfaces help you to generate and make sense of data. (For example, a “pain map” lets you mark areas of discomfort on a visual image of the body.)

On the down side, Smart Diary Suite v. 4 is for Windows only (Mac users are out of luck). So in all fairness I must admit that I haven’t been able to test-drive it first hand—though there is a lot of detailed information on the web site. But I am pleased to see products entering the market that use strategies and approaches similar to some of the ones Project HealthDesign has been working on. 

Are there applications you that you want to share with the Project HealthDesign community? I’ll be posting soon on some of the health applications I’ve seen on the iPhone—and I’d love to hear your thoughts about these or other personal health applications you may know of.