Track change in pain intensity, symptoms, medication intake during an attack#1220

This topic has generated a great deal of discussion, so let’s focus on gathering your feedback and suggestions related specifically to tracking changes here.

Some of you have already provided valuable input through a survey, we got more than 1200 answers!!!! You are such a great community and I want to thank you very much for your contributions.
Your insights have been instrumental in our efforts to incorporate the evolution of attacks into a calendar feature for chronic migraine sufferers experiencing daily attacks. Our technicians are currently hard at work on this, so stay tuned for updates I will communicate on its availability and functionality when it is ready to launch.

For those who are not chronic, don’t worry! We’re still actively exploring the best approach to meet your needs. To better understand how we can provide the best solutions, I’ll soon be sharing a new questionnaire designed specifically for non-chronic migraine sufferers (those who don’t have daily attacks).

Let’s continue to collaborate on this journey together!
Your input is invaluable, thank you for sharing it!

Thank you Jenny, this is great. I look forward to the next questionnaire

Hi Aidan, they are working on a pain and symptom variation feature to include in the app. It is nearly ready. We need to be a little more patient before it is fully tested and integrated in the app ;)

Its good Aidan. This is something I’ve been waiting for since 2016. They’ll get it.

Hi everyone! I’ve been working on a tool called Migraine Buddy Data Converter (i.e. https://github.com/rich-martinez/migraine-buddy-data-converter) that converts the standard Migraine Buddy CSV export into rich, structured JSON. Once data is in a predictable JSON model, it becomes far easier to build deeper analytics, visualize long-term trends (e.g., Grafana/Infinity dashboards), and answer everyday questions like “Which months had the sharpest pain spikes?”, “How often did this medication actually help?”, or “What did my symptom intensities look like when the pain maxed out?”

Key things the converter adds on top of the raw CSV:

• Groups logs by day/month/quarter/year and computes detailed stats for each period (min/max pain, mean/median/mode, total pain-free days, etc.).
• Reconstructs the full pain-intensity timeline by filling in missing levels so multi-day attacks are more accurate.
• Normalizes preset note entries (pain moves, medications, symptoms, attack changes) into machine-readable objects, each with explicit timestamps.
• Produces both a “clean” migraine dataset (one JSON per attack) and a “unit-of-time” dataset ready for analysis tools.

Because of this, a few tweaks on Migraine Buddy’s side would dramatically improve downstream tooling:

1. Every action carries an explicit UTC timestamp. The CLI already converts to any local timezone, but the source data needs a consistent reference. If all note presets (“Pain increased to level 6”, “Took sumatriptan”, symptom start/end, etc.) surfaced ISO 8601 UTC datetimes, the converter could preserve precision without guessing.

2. JSON should be an official export option. The current CSV is workable but still requires a lot of parsing. A first-party JSON export mirroring the internal data model (with nested arrays for pain changes, meds, symptoms, triggers) would remove a brittle step for every downstream project and open the door to plug-and-play visualizations.

3. Track pain-level changes as structured fields, not only embedded in notes. Right now the converter scrapes “Pain increased/decreased to level X” out of note text. If those changes were stored as a dedicated list (each entry = level + timestamp), anyone could calculate intensity ranges, slopes, recovery times, etc., without text parsing.

4. Expose medication and symptom lifecycle events separately from free-form notes. When “I took this drug” or “This symptom stopped” arrivals are stored as discrete entities (with drug name, dose, effectiveness, symptom name, intensity, etc.), tooling can answer questions like “How quickly did nausea intensity drop after I took medication?” automatically.

5. Include optional structured fields for triggers, pain positions, premonitory symptoms, affected activities, and non-drug reliefs. The CLI already aggregates these, but they’re currently embedded in textual fields. Consistent keys/counts would make population-level analysis and personal dashboards much more reliable.

With these additions, any Migraine Buddy user (or their clinicians, researchers, data-curious contributors) could run the CLI, get a tidy JSON dataset, and immediately start exploring: “Show me pain-free days by quarter,” “Plot medication effectiveness over time,” “Correlate weather notes with symptom intensity.” Happy to collaborate with anyone interested in shaping the export format or extending the converter—let’s make the Migraine Buddy dataset as actionable as the community deserves!

Again here is the repository for the Migraine Buddy Data Converter, which includes instructions on how to use it: https://github.com/rich-martinez/migraine-buddy-data-converter?tab=readme-ov-file#migraine-buddy-data-converter

…and how to get the most value out of your Migraine Buddy data: https://github.com/rich-martinez/migraine-buddy-data-converter?tab=readme-ov-file#best-practices

Here is an example of using the ouput of this tool to visualize the Migraine Buddy data: https://github.com/rich-martinez/migraine-buddy-data-converter?tab=readme-ov-file#example-visualization-result-using-grafana

I agree! The pain should be a graph to track. Especially with times so we can accurately record what is happening and when we took medication/tried relief methods.

Let the pain # and location be traceable by day even if it’s a multiday attack, because they change and progress

I would like to be able to track my average pain throughout the migrane rather than the peak pain. Say, for the first 3 hours I’m at a 6/10 for one hour I’m at a 9/10 and then the next 7 hours it’s weaning down to 0.
It would be nice to update both intensity of symptons and the pain to track how it changes or remains the same on an hourly basis. I think this would help track how long migranes are truely lasting vs. How long it takes the brain to recover from the pain of them.
On the same topic, I’d like to be able to meld the prodome, migrane and postdrome together somehow. I was not able to log taking meds during the prodrome phase to contribute to migrane data, because I had to log them as two seperate attacks to differentiate the symptoms.

I was going to suggest this but I knew it had to have been suggested already. Second to this, it would be nice to have time stamps on posts and comments. That way when someone says “this feature is nearly ready” if that was posted a few days ago then I know it wasn’t forgotten about, if it was posted a year ago then it was likely forgotten 😆

Thank you Jenny. I will really benefit from the opportunity to track constant migraine. I’m only new to your app but very much appreciate your sincere interest in understanding and improving the app for all. Thank you!