Tracking bowel movements and feedings became a necessity for us as my son had a couple digestion issues when he was born. Collecting data not only helped us manage the situation better, but it was crucial for us to communicate the symptoms to our doctors to get referred to the right specialist for the care he needed. Thanks for sharing this.
Goes for kids at any age really if they have health problems. My parents' daily tracking of my siblings' asthma status was crucial to get them good care when we were growing up. Both for analysis by the specialists and daily by my parents.
Being able to confidently predict "it looks like he will have a cold in one or two days, let's increase his dose and preempt it" based on PEF (peak expiratory flow) measurement done morning and evening was such a boon. Also being able to confidently identify patterns like "he always gets worse when we do X". We did it with pen and paper, but today of course there's an app for that:
Only if medical professionals actually pay attention to the data you’re gathering. My first daughter had a horrible first few months of life due to an undiagnosed tongue tie. The evidence was right there.
2nd child I got gaslighted again until I went to the _specific person_ who had diagnosed it correctly the first time. And yeah, exactly the same problem (different symptoms, but children are different). Turns out she’d been disciplined after the first time for stepping out of lane.
(You’ll note, not for being wrong, the diagnosis got independently confirmed both times.)
Medical professionals like and are used to being the unquestioned experts. But you are always the expert of your own child (because, like I said before, every child is different.)
Sleep as well. There is no way you are going to remember what happened last week much less two nights ago without a journal of some kind. Pencil and paper are great. But data accessible anywhere from any device is a use case that I can see being a necessity. Voice input may be a desired feature as well. For hands-free operation ;)
