WorkOutDoors and Strava have carried the last fortnight's actual logging, WorkOutDoors reserved for Walk & Talk sessions where the narrative and the FIT file together comprise the data, Strava for everything else, building a broader baseline picture across Qigong, Tai Chi, and walking. Working through the wider app layer in conversation with Claude produced an audit worth recording here, and a working plan that follows from it.
Data
| App | Captures | Role |
|---|---|---|
| WorkOutDoors | GPX/FIT plus spoken narrative | W&T sessions only |
| Strava | Broad activity baseline | Live, pulled by Claude on request |
| Hume | HR, HRV, SpO2, respiratory rate, skin temperature, sleep, BP estimate, via its own band | Recovery narrative, retained for the separate sensor |
| PeakWatch / Gentler Streak / The Outsiders | HRV, resting HR, sleep, all from the same Watch signal | Redundant readiness scores, one voice to be retained |
| Sonar | Cross-app aggregation and correlation views | Export capacity unconfirmed |
| AllTrails / Footpath / OS Maps | Terrain and elevation profile | Visual asset only, not a data source |
Gentler Streak currently reads as telling me I am dying too quickly. Hume, on the same morning, credits me with the heart and body of a fifty-five-year-old.
Explanation
Four separate apps deriving a recovery score from essentially the same signal produced that contradiction, and neither figure is a reading in any strict sense. Both are interpretive layers over the same HRV and sleep data, weighted and voiced differently by their respective models. The working rule for the Digest is to anchor on raw comparable figures, HRV in milliseconds, resting heart rate, sleep efficiency, and treat any app's narrative score as a cited opinion rather than an adopted verdict.
The "always on" approach to collection had also become its own source of fatigue, a different cognitive load from the practice itself. A fixed, recognisable output format addresses that directly: a fortnightly Digest, the fourteen-day window chosen deliberately to absorb the odd low-capacity day without skewing the average. That fatigue, and the redesign answering it, is itself consistent with an autoethnographic method: the researcher's adaptation to instrumentation is part of the record, not incidental to it.
What is genuinely automatic at present is limited. Watch and Hume data collect themselves in the background regardless of any of this; Strava is available to Claude on request with no export needed. Apple Health's own export is a single deliberate action; Sonar's export capacity, if it has one, is still unconfirmed. The fully hands-off version, Claude Cowork's Scheduled Tasks running the whole assembly on its own cadence, is not yet live. Until it is, the fortnightly conversation itself is the one beat still needing a human hand, the bass holding rhythm while the melody, the actual recovery plan, gets worked out.
In short
The fortnightly Digest becomes the standing artifact on this layer, rolling up into a quarterly correlation piece sitting alongside the iPad footage already being captured for Five Animals, a movement chunk compared across a quarter against the numbers telling the same story. The interim plan holds until Scheduled Tasks is live: Strava pulled on request, a Health export before each fortnightly conversation, Sonar checked once for an export option, and any terrain image from that fortnight's hill day added alongside.