CASE STUDY | PERSONAL PROJECT
2024 Health Data
Turning one year of iPhone Health data into an Apple inspired interactive Tableau dashboard built from raw XML export, CSV files and personal data.​
CLIENT
Personal project
SCOPE
Data, Design, Dev
YEAR
2025
TOOLS
Python, SQL, Tableau
01
THE CONTEXT
Our phones know more about us than we do
Every day our phones, watches and smart devices collect data about us, whether we're paying attention or not. I wanted to find out what my iPhone actually knew about me — what the Apple Health app measured, what it ignored, and what a full year of that data could look like when you actually built something to explore it.
02
THE CLIENT
Personal project
PROJECT TYPE
Personal / Research
Exploration of personal health data as a design and storytelling challenge.
DATA SOURCE
Apple Health XML export, CSV smart scale data, Gym reservations and Activity logs.
FIELD
Health & Wellbeing
Personal Data
Quantified Self​
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AUDIENCE
Healthcare providers, Wearablesmakers
Data, design and Tableau community
03
THE CHALLENGE
The data existed. Making sense of it didn't.
The Apple Health export is a single XML file — enormous, messy, and completely opaque without technical tools to parse it. Variables are inconsistently named, data from different device sources overlaps, and there is no built-in way to connect health metrics with external data like gym visits or sleep logs.
"The default Health app shows you today. This project Is about showing the whole year at once and finding the patterns hiding inside it."
04
THE PROCESS
From raw XML to an Apple-inspired interactive dashboard.
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The project started with a very large XML export. Python was used to parse and clean the XML export — removing irrelevant variables and restructuring everything into a clean SQL database. Smart scale measurements, gym reservations, and sports activity logs were downloaded separately and joined in Tableau.
Early data exploration in Tableau — finding the relationships worth visualising.
With clean data in place, the design challenge was to surface meaningful relationships across five data layers simultaneously. The solution was a multi-layered circular diagram — inspired by Ludovic Tavernier's award-winning Weather Memories — combined with five connected charts (bars, lines, bubbles) all driven by a single month-selector dropdown.
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For the visual language, I wanted to recreate the iPhone health app aesthetic as much as possible. I downloaded the Apple styleguide, fonts and icon package, so it was pretty easy to approximate what it would look like if Apple would ever show its data this comprehensively. I ended up choosing my own cleaner version though.
05
THE OUTCOME
A year of invisible data, made explorable
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The finished dashboard brought together iPhone accelerometer data, sleep tracking, weight measurements, gym logs, and outdoor activity records into a single interactive view. Patterns invisible in the default Health app became clear — the relationship between sleep quality and next-day movement, seasonal shifts in activity, and months where training consistency dropped.
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The project was rewarded Tableau "Viz of the Day"in March 2025 and it was also featured in a podcast about the visualization (see below for links).
5+
Data sources merged into one view
>20k
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Views on Tablueau public
365
Days of health data visualised
​> See the interactive version below or on Tableau public
> Hear the podcast episode here
06
WHY IT MATTERS
Most organisations are sitting on the same problem
Data that exists but can't be explored is data that doesn't work. Whether it's years of operational metrics, customer behaviour, or annual impact reports — the challenge is almost always the same: the raw material is there, but the interface to make sense of it has never been built.
This project is a proof of concept. With the right combination of data engineering and visualisation design, information that was locked away becomes something people actually open, explore, and talk about.