Fulcra wants to give you one safe place to store and analyze your personal data

People today use all kinds of digital systems to track and plan their lives and health, from calendar apps to smart watches to sleep monitoring systems.

But each of those tools typically store data in their own specific formats and repositories, making it difficult to easily analyze information from multiple sources to spot patterns like nighttime activities that disrupt sleep or monitor trends. A startup called Fulcra Dynamics hopes to change that, building a unified platform with all of your personal data accessible and understandable through customizable dashboards and AI-powered chat.

As cofounder and CEO Michael Tiffany points out, businesses have for years had their choice of platforms for building “data lakes,” where everything from sales records to employee information can be brought together from different databases, analyzed, and correlated—and, increasingly, connected to AI.

“There’s actually nothing like that for us as consumers,” Tiffany says. “All of our data is just siloed and spread out across a zillion apps and services.”

With Fulcra, now available in beta, consumers can import data from a variety of sources, from wearables like the Oura Ring and Apple Watch to apps like Strava and Google Calendar. Then, they can view daily updates on data like steps walked, heart rate, calories in and out, and sleep hygiene, depending on what information they import. A timeline view also makes it easy to search for relationships in the data, like seeing if your heart rate is elevated during particular activities from your calendar, and a map view visualizes logs of places visited, with changes in location also highlighted on the timeline. The company plans to charge roughly $15 per month for the service.

Tiffany said the tool helped him see a connection with ambient noise levels—which his smart watch monitors but he hadn’t paid particular attention to—and disruptions in his sleep. In ">a promotional video, Fulcra Head of Product Diana Kusunoki says she was able to easily track her heart rate during a trip to Colombia for a wedding and compare it to more ordinary days, spotting that it was naturally elevated while dancing but not so much while flying.

Users can view the dashboards on the web or an iOS app, and they can also take advantage of an AI concierge to ask questions about anything from historic health data to where they were at a particular time. 

“I’ve got this data going back to 2022, which is like an amazing computer-augmented memory,” says Tiffany. “I really know what has happened over the past two years.”

Tiffany, who previously cofounded the security company Human, emphasizes personal data is kept private and not used to train any AI systems. Users can also take advantage of a Fulcra API to allow their data to be accessed by other systems, whether they’re writing code to run on their own laptop or integrating with another AI interface—Tiffany himself uses his own custom GPT instance to analyze his stats. And those who wish to do so can share a selected subset of their data with others, like a doctor, fitness trainer, or relative.

But plenty of users will likely be satisfied using the built-in timeline and AI functionality, which don’t require any programming knowledge, since Fulcra takes care of integrating with the third-party systems where people’s data is already stored. Tiffany compares Fulcra’s launch to the unveiling of Dropbox, which helped make file synching—already available in theory to those with the technical knowledge and resources to build their own systems—reliable and practical for everyday consumers.

“Very similarly, what we’re trying to do is give people the power and the convenience of cloud storage but with privacy, and with control over the data ultimately residing with the consumer,” he says.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91183388/fulcra-wants-to-give-you-one-safe-place-to-store-and-analyze-your-personal-data?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss