Tictrac opens up to help make health tracking more mainstream

Activity-logging wristbands, sleep trackers, heart rate monitors and the other accoutrements of the growing Quantified Self movement are all well and good. But, for now, it’s mostly just early adopter techies and health geeks who use them, and for the most part they don’t get a big picture view of their aggregated data and underlying patterns.

But Tictrac has an answer to that in the form of a personal analytics dashboard that it launched in closed beta last year and opened up to the public this week.

The startup integrates with about 50 APIs to enable people to pull in data from apps like Runkeeper, trackers like Fitbit (see disclosure below) and sleep monitoring tools like Sleepio. Once the data is ingested in Tictrac, users can see easier-to-understand visualizations of each data stream as well identify relationships between the different parts of their lives.

“Our focus with Tictrac is around bringing together all lifestyle factors with respect to health,” said CEO and founder Martin Blinder. “What affects you in one aspect of your life will affect you in another.”

Since launching in private beta a year ago, the company has mostly focused on being a consumer web service. But, Blinder said, Tictrac has started working with employers and health and fitness experts to make health tracking more accessible and helpful to those with (or at risk for) chronic conditions. It recently closed a deal with European telecom company Telefonica to support a corporate wellness program and other similar partnerships are likely ahead.

On the site, Tictrac helps users organize their data around “projects” related to goals like losing weight or lifestyle changes like caring for a newborn. This week, the startup rolled out four new projects for asthma, diabetes, chronic bronchitis and blood pressure. Through those projects, health professionals and fitness coaches can tailor programs for their patients and clients and use the site to assess progress.

For example, for a patient at risk for diabetes, a doctor could create a project that outlines activity and nutrition recommendations and then follow the patient’s activity, weight loss, eating habits and more. Because Tictrac allows users to integrate their calendars, travel schedules, email and other non-health data, a doctor monitoring a patient with asthma could use Tictrac to identify potential lifestyle patterns related to when asthma attacks were triggered.

Other startups and companies are starting to offer more sophisticated and social patient engagement and corporate wellness platforms. And Tictrac isn’t the only company looking to help consumers aggregate their health data to uncover insights. Earlier this month, for example, we reported that WebMD and Qualcomm Life have teamed up to offer a health hub that similarly enables people to sync and analyze data from multiple health tracking tools. But Tictrac (which has only raised an angel round but says it isn’t looking to raise more funding now because it’s earning revenue) is an interesting startup to watch because it makes the data easy to follow, visually compelling and meaningful.