We’ve always been so excited about this feature!
It’s been requested time and time again, since we first started Birdhouse, in fact, and we just have not had the resources to build it until now. And that feature is…. drumroll please….
Yes, Reports. Until now, the only way to see all the activity items you’ve been entering is to scroll through your child’s Activity timeline. Reports changes that. As of today, it’s available as a Premium feature.
Reports provides 3 new ways of visualizing Activity items that you’ve posted:
- A plot graph
- Bar charts
- Custom excel exports
Let’s see how they work, using 5 weeks of Josh’s Birdhouse data from last October.
You’ll notice a new tab on your Birdhouse dashboard, titled Reports.
Once you’re in Reports, you’ll see a blank plot graph with a big smiley face. Enter the duration of time you want to view data for by choosing a Start and End date. That’ll produce a bar graph just below the (currently empty) plot graph, indicating the number of occurrences of each Activity type you entered for the duration you chose.
To visualize the data on the plot graph, just click on the Activity types you want to see. Let’s start with Sleep. Clicking the Sleep bar in the bar graph will plot out all of the Sleep activities that were logged for Josh between October 6 and November 10, which look like this:
Josh is a pretty good sleeper, but it looks like something began to affect him towards the end of October. What else was logged then? Did we start any new meds or supplements at that time? Let’s find out, by clicking the Nutrition bar in the bar chart.
Aha! We did, indeed. If we scroll down below the plot graph and click the button to “Show advanced filters”, we can drill down to exactly what it was that was started at the end of October.
Josh also suffers from the occasional meltdown. Out of curiosity, let’s see what it looks like if I click Meltdowns in the bar chart so his meltdowns appear on that plot graph amidst Sleep and Nutrition:
Now things are really getting interesting!
Josh’s meltdowns increased in frequency after he started taking that new supplement. Normally we, or even a doctor, might jump to the conclusion that the new supplement was causing more meltdowns. But if I look closer, I can see that Josh had a meltdown only on the days that he woke up around 5am, which even happened once before the supplement was started, seemingly validating that trend.
This plot tells me that the less sleep Josh gets, the more prone he is to melt down that day, and that the new supplement seems to have negatively affected Josh’s sleep.
Now, to the third way of visualizing your data: Exports
Once you’ve selected exactly the type of information you want, you can export it and do with it what you like. Alternatively, you can use this customizable export function on its own to extract exactly what you need, which is a huge step up from the bulk export function on the main Activity page that downloads every Activity item you’ve ever logged into one file. Perhaps you need that, perhaps you don’t, but it’s great to have the choice.
You can print out these reports, take them to your next doctor visit, next IEP, or even just share them with your therapists and other team members. There are two easy ways to print out your personalized report: either simply print out your report from the web or export to a spreadsheet and print that spreadsheet. Super easy!
Now, this is not to be taken as medical advice, but it can certainly provide far greater context for a doctor, specialist, or parent in their decision making process and quest to find the best supports for their child.
When we’re running around day to day and trying our hardest just to keep it together some days, details like these disappear in a heartbeat if they aren’t written down. Birdhouse not only will keep track of those details for you, but it’ll automatically date stamp and time stamp everything, make it searchable, and now, will report back to you, your teacher, your doctor, or whoever you need to share this information with!
We’re so excited to make this available to you. We hope it helps you to understand your child in new ways, and we can’t wait to hear from you about it.