View the online visualization here.
Design Statement
For my Personal Data Project, I chose to record activities and how healthy my meals were daily. My goal was to find a certain threshold to achieve for on a weekly basis for my personal health. I decided to rate the level of healthiness of each meal and give it an overall rating for the day from 1 – 4, 1 being very unhealthy and 4 being very healthy. I also decided to record how many times a week I do some sort of physical exercise such as running, working out etc. I decided not to record how long each activity is and chose to just simply record whether I did or did not exercise. Additionally, I decided to record whether I did something I consider unhealthy activities such as binge drinking Pullman style. Since I did not what to face the reality of just how much I am consuming I chose to again record a yes or no for this activity. Since I am scoring myself I had to come up with some way to grade my results. I chose to add up my weekly diet score along with how many times I exercised. Along with if I did anything I deemed unhealthy I would subtract 1 point from my weekly score. For my perfect score I used what I believed to be an ideal week, 4-5 days or more exercising a week, no unhealthy activities, and an average of a 3 for my diet score. This came out to be roughly a 74% score or a 26/35.
For my charts, I decided to do the same three for both the static graphics and the interactive graphic. This way I could find which is more useful in portraying my information and which is easier to do. I wanted to do more with my interactive graphics but due to my limited understanding on how to use Tableau I hit a wall. For my first graphic, I chose to show on a weekly basis what my score was along with my ideal score. From the chart, you can easily see when I achieve my goal and when I do not. For my second one I compared how many days I worked out during a week and how many days I did something unhealthy during the same week. I used green to represent the positive activity and red to represent the negative. I kept this consistent through most of my charts. For my 3rd chart I found the averages for my dietary scores by day along with how many times on did an activity on a specific day. This chart was harder to represent as I was very limited to bar charts. This was not my most useful chart but it allowed me to view my patterns and how on certain days I habitually do things.
It was interesting to look back at my semester and remember the reasons why at times my scores dipped. I could view a period where I became very ill and was bed ridden and couldn’t eat, drink, or exercise. This impacted two of the 10 weeks scores and brought them down greatly. Earlier on in the weeks is also usually when I go grocery shopping so I was able to eat healthier meals. As the week goes on my diet score slowly declines or will pop back up again until I go grocery shopping again. I only achieved my personal goal of a 74% or above score once and that was when I went back to the westside for thanksgiving break. I’m still not where I want to be physically but my diet is improving which is one of the primary reasons I decided to choose this topic. I wish I could have done better and also created a better graphic in tableau but it was really interesting to see my habits for the last 10 weeks.