Calculating triggers online?

A couple of weeks ago we were talking about easy ways to log your migraine attacks or headaches on the go – specifically, by phone using Jott.  But an email from Ben in the United States got me thinking in a different direction about keeping track of headaches online.

Ben has a great idea – or at least the start of a great idea, in a site he created called HeadacheLog.com.  He actually created the site for his wife, who suffers from chronic headaches.

Here’s the idea.  You enter your specific headache information, along with what you recently ate, how bad the attack was, how much sleep you had, and so on.  Also, you log approximately where you were at the time (ie what city.  Unfortunately, this only works in the USA).

Being all on computer, computers can now do what they do best – calculate.  After a while, you can get reports, and see what you commonly ate before a headache, for example.  And, one nifty part of the program is that it checks what the weather was in the area, so you can also check for weather triggers.

I think it’s a fantastic idea – as long as, of course, you use it as a tool and not as a absolute rigid perfect prophetic headache bible.

Now, I said it was the start of a good idea.  In my opinion, the program needs to be developed.  For example, you can only choose from certain foods you may have eaten, and you can’t add your own.  There are other things that could be added – menstrual cycles, for example.  Being able to add symptoms would also be helpful, since all headaches are not created equal.

But I certainly think the idea is worth developing – I can’t believe I haven’t seen more sites or programs like this before.  The more detailed you could make a program like this (without making it complicated, of course) the more useful it would be.

One more clever thing on this site – it allows the headache stats to be aggregated.  If a program like this came into wide use, pretty soon we might start learning things about migraines and headaches that we didn’t know before.

Check it out and give it a try here.  If you find it helpful, or have used something similar, share your comments.