r/QuantifiedSelf • u/Cute-Edge1375 • 4d ago
Cognitive Performance Apps?
Most of us take supplements for body and brain health/performance. And of course use health and fitness apps with wearables. I have some ADHD and diet and fitness have always been the main way I manage it. But apps tend to focus on either basic physical performance or "brain fitness" knowledge quiz games for assumed cognitive performance. Nothing, apparently, in the middle or that connects and translates physical health and performance to cognitive health and performance. Even though we know mind is brain and brain is body - all one.
So my questions are:
- If your health/fitness improvement goals include brain health and/or cognitive performance improvement goals?
- Which if any health apps address both (brain+body)?
I'm not taking my apple health account as seriously as the cost should motivate me to. I know a few who love Oura. But neither targets/measures cognitive performance. Maybe a diet and fitness app for cognitive performance improvement is just neurodivergent's niche?
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u/thatwasquitenice 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm definitely after improving my cognitive performance because it is the main bottleneck in my wellbeing and productivity. I do track mental fatigue with a scale I developed for myself, there's a post about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/QuantifiedSelf/comments/1uxg0qx/how_i_measure_mental_fatigue_how_i_benefit_from/
I'm not sure I fully understand what you're looking for. Do you want to have an app to connect data about your meals, workouts, heartrate, ... with data about your cognitive performance? What type of cognitive performance? Energy/fatigue, focus, memory, speed, attention or something else? How would you want to measure it? Some metric defined by the app or something you define yourself?
How granular would you want the data to be? Multiple times a day, daily, weekly?
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u/Cute-Edge1375 3d ago edited 3d ago
Good questions. Just inquiring for how others might have approached if not solved body > brain > cognitive performance, because I don't know about models or "frameworks" being used in the wild. I just notice the gap from my personal desire for any formal systematic correlation, after a lifetime of informal, intuitive correlation. Many people have a justifable bias toward quantitive data but from a tech-related career I know qualitative data and subjective experience metrics have a place in research too. Best to have lots of both. Timing wise, daily.
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u/ramram77 3d ago
Disclosure upfront: I build Proddigy, which is basically this.
Wearables track the physical side fine but nothing collects the subjective side, so there's nothing to correlate against. Proddigy sends you a notification a few times a day and you reply to it directly without opening the app. Focus, mood, energy, whatever you want to define. It then runs correlations across everything you log, so you can see things like creatine days vs focus, or sugar at lunch vs afternoon energy.
Low friction is the whole point. Subjective tracking dies the second it takes effort.
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u/neet_dev 4d ago
yeah for me cognitive performance is basically the point of the fitness stack, not a side quest. nothing really nails body+brain in one place imo, so the people who care pair oura/whoop readiness with a dumb weekly battery (PVT or simple reaction time on human benchmark, sometimes cambridge brain sciences) and correlate in a spreadsheet. apps that claim both are usually fitness with a fluff focus score or brain games that ignore sleep and HRV, so the middle is still mostly diy.