A quick note on baselines and monitoring

People in IT generally get the importance of monitoring for spotting issues. This is why surveillance systems tend toward overkill on data capture as well. Because looking for a pattern, much less a trend in limited data too often leads to the wrong conclusions.

The current CoVid-19 guidelines include taking you temperature twice a day. At first this might seem excessive but here is the deal.

• 98.6 is a generalized average for humans. But actual people vary a fair bit from that. I remember the first physical I had to have for a job the doctor tried 3 thermometers on me before finally deciding I was fine other than being on the low end of the spectrum. 
• Then you add to that people's temp varies over the day and thermometers are not near as accurate as most people assume. Take your temp 2 or 3 times in 5 minutes and see for yourself. 

So knowing YOUR normal range with YOUR thermometer is critical to knowing if you actually have a fever. Those with allergies probably already know this as often a fever it the main difference between a bad allergy day and having a cold or the flu.

Personally I use MyNetDiary to log all kinds of health data including how I feel, pills I take, food I eat and even how much water I drink cause when I feel like crap I want to know why. And hopefully how I can work out how to avoid it happening again or at least plan to deal. This can be very useful sorting allergies and controlling weight as well. Being able to see the data in charts really helps in seeing patterns and bad data too.

Note there are lots of online tracking services I like MyNetDiary because it support custom things like temperature. Note they hide these in the diabetes section for some reason I've never sorted. You will notice above I even track the room temperature at the time I take my temperature just to ensure if there is any variance discovered later that might be accounted for by the room temp. Like I said there really is no such thing as too much data. You can always filter or delete later but you can not go back and get data you did not think mattered at the time.

For easy of use it is hard to beat the Withings Thermo Sadly Withings does not show charts for temperature. But then last I checked transcribing into a service like MyNetDiary was the only way to get a chart of your temperature. Maybe after this outbreak that will change.  

Things to monitor and control

People often ask for ideas of what to do next. I say if you can count your devices, you need more.

Some of the things I'm doing:

• Smart bulbs and light switches of course mostly controlled by motion and or contact switches
• Alarm system
• TV and other AV gear mainly via Harmony hubs
• Voice assistants
• 61 security cameras (at the moment and not including the Ring doorbell as it is cloud based) linked into HA motion sensors, alarm system and AV controls to mark video and send triggered cams to main stream video dependent alert and alarm levels.
• Indoor and component temperature monitoring, smart thermostat and window AC and fan controls.
• Weather monitoring
• Watering system
• Tons of monitoring, as that is the bit that people always seem to forget, Which tells me is something is offline or a battery is low or is signalling replacement as in the case of a UPS. This ranges to things like shows being short on a TiVo which would indicate the cable company knocked the tuner offline with an update again and over loaded CPUs on PC and updates need applied. I even wrote a program to make adding things to monitor easier.

Still on the to-do list:

• Find smart door locks that can tell me the doors lock status at a reasonable price. The weather is so variable here in central Texas, heat and humidity wise that exterior doors change shape enough that doors tend to need a push or a pull for the dead bolt to align so I've given up on actually being able to lock/unlock them. Wish now I'd wired the dead bolt holes with recessed switches.
• Open garage door on command though mainly for the "Goodbye" routine that puts the site into away mode only after checking the alarm is ready to arm. Seen too many glitches to feel good about it opening automatically on return.
• Smarter motion recognition. Ultimate goal is to be able to have it tell me what is sees moving and tell me where a pet was last seen. Would prefer a Blue Iris plugin or similar but might look at a separate system like YOLO I can send triggered images to.
• Want GPS tracking of pets when practical. Which seems soon.
• Of course wild critters are getting to be big deal here which accounts for many of the cameras. For example I recently added 4 just trying to find a snake that got in the shop. Lately feral hogs are the thing.
• Well and water softener monitor so know if the well has tripped, a filter has clogged or a pipe is leaking / burst.

Other stuff some have mentioned but not on my list:

• Smart or controllable blinds.