This post didn't lead to me discovering any new devices, and I haven't heard from anyone who found something they valued via it. So overall not a success, but it was easy to write so I don't regret the attempt.
You likely know this already, but future readers might not: There are a couple potential gotchas about using pulse oximetry on its own to rule out a trip to urgent care. Both are edge cases of the fact that it's actually measuring the ratio of bound to unbound hemoglobin in the blood as a proxy for blood oxygenation. Both can be pretty confidently ruled out by an additional gadget.
First, carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin even more readily than oxygen does. Someone who's been breathing CO may read 100% on a pulse oximeter, because 100% of their hemoglobin is bound to something, but it's bound to CO instead of O2 so they're not getting properly oxygenated. This can be addressed by having working carbon monoxide detectors in your home.
Second, if there's not enough hemoglobin going around your system due to internal bleeding, you can have 100% of the available hemoglobin bound to oxygen and yet not be getting enough total number of oxygen molecules delivered to your body in the time frame that the tissues need it. This edge case can be addressed by monitoring your blood pressure, as it'll often (but not always, at first!) change as your body tries to compensate for blood loss. Monitoring for any signs of GI bleeding or unusual bruising can also help make sure you seek care at an appropriate time even if the pulse oximeter reads 100% saturation.
Those are the major situations in which a pulse oximeter will claim you're OK when you actually aren't. When you're confident that you've got an appropriate amount of hemoglobin going around in your blood and there's no CO in your environment for it to bind to instead of oxygen, the device will be a pretty accurate proxy for whether your breathing is adequately oxygenating your blood.
Edited to add -- there's another gadget that someone who cares a lot about measuring their respiration might want to know exists, and it looks like they're available for a couple hundred bucks for home use. It's called an end-tidal CO2, or etco2, monitor. I don't have the training/background to explain that like pulse oximetry, but it could be good to look into if you often find yourself in the situation of "breathing feels different from usual, I wonder what changed" and enjoy data.
Non-health measurement device recommendation:
We finally replaced our phone & Internet setup of <Wi-Fi router + modem + wireless phone base station> with a single all-in-one AVM router (Fritz!Box), and if I'd known how good such devices are, I would've bought them a decade earlier. Not only does this remove so many interfaces and cables and power adapters and points of failure, it also gives you all the diagnostic features in one device, which makes it much much easier to resolve problems yourself.
Before, any problem with our Internet connection was incredibly frustrating to diagnose because it might be caused by the router, or the modem (neither of which, incidentally, had good logging or diagnostic capabilities), or the cable from the Internet providor to the modem, or the connection between router and modem, etc. etc.
Now, that stuff is all in one device, and diagnostics is so much easier: if I can't login to the router from any of my devices, it must be a problem with the router. And if I can reach the router, I can run the comprehensive on-device diagnostic tools, which can in turn tell me where the problem is and even what to do about it.
I second the section on air quality monitors. I only have a CO2 monitor, but find it really helpful for problems of the form "I feel vaguely KO. I wonder why that is... <consults CO2 monitor> Oh, I should've aired the room out hours ago.".
Some additional notes on this topic: The monitor I have isn't particularly good for this purpose. It was a test winner from Stiftung Warentest (the German customer review site), so maybe it's particularly accurate, and I certainly paid as if it was. But it turns out you just don't need a particularly accurate device for this purpose; it's enough if the displayed values are sufficiently correlated with the actual ones. A cheaper device would have been just fine.
Furthermore, to maintain this (supposed) accuracy, the monitor has a truly ludicous design: Any time it's disconnected and reconnected, like when it's installed in a new room, it re-calibrates itself under the assumption that the room has just been aired out completely, and assumes that the current CO2 level is 400 ppm. Afterwards, it re-calibrates itself such that it assumes the lowest CO2 level in the last week was 400 pm. These two aspects make it utterly useless for measuring CO2 anywhere you can't air out completely, like a cellar. (Though it's fine in my room, which I air out regularly.)
In a second feature, the monitor has an optional CO2 alarm and begins beeping when the CO2 level reaches a set threshold like 1500-2000 ppm. Unfortunately, its CO2 measurements take a while, so when it beeps you either have to manually turn off the alarm each time (there's no snooze button), or air out the room for 20+s before it stops.
In conclusion: monitors for CO2 or air quality yay, this device nay.
Watchband and ring fitness trackers will sometimes claim to report HRV, but they're not very good. Measuring HRV requires very precise measurements, and the signal of the heartbeat gets fuzzier the further you are from the heart. When I look next I'll be looking for something favored by HIIT nerdjocks, because HIIT also requires very sensitive measurements.
Health trackers vary a lot in quality, so it might be worthwhile to briefly check the Quantified Scientist Youtube channel (or even email him) for whether he has found any he could recommend for that purpose. I really like that channel for doing calibrated tracker measurements. Imagine a world where those kinds of product reviews were industry standard, instead of SEO content mills.
As a gardener, a simple rain meter like this one has been a useful tool I found in recent years. AcuRite 5" Capacity Easy-to-Read Magnifying Acrylic, Blue (00850A2) Rain Gauge https://a.co/d/iRd0phK
Weather forecasts will often predict how many inches of rain are probably coming, but it's surprisingly hard to find records after the fact of how much rain actually fell. So you might not know, especially if the rain falls at night or when you're out of the house.
Knowing whether we got 0.1 inches or 1 inch of rain can make a difference in my watering plans.
A soil moisture meter probe can also be useful, but usually I don't think about using it, so it hasn't done much for me personally other than calibrating my instincts the few times I did use one. I would recommend one for gardeners with less experience or less willingness to kill plants than I have.
A USB microscope. Just point it at an arbitrary thing and learn more about it! (Say "Examine" for good luck.)
I don't have the following, but I wish I did: A heat camera, an ultrasound probe, a sound camera, an e-nose. Sensors ought to have high bandwidth, in order to give you a chance to notice any anomalies.
Home water testing: these are periodic tests rather than continuous monitors, and aren't cheap either. My doctor recommended this one but it's more expensive than the water filter I use, so maybe find a cheaper one or skip straight to filtering (the test did verify my filter worked, and this was pretty late in the filter's lifecycle). You can also use EWG to check your city's water data, although it will miss problems in your own pipes.
Did you have a reason to suspect that your tap water in particular was bad (e.g. after seeing EWG's measurements), or was the filtration more of an attempt to reduce all the possible environmental contaminants in general? I have heard a lot about air quality impacting health, but not as much about water quality. I would be grateful to hear about any resources you have in mind for why one should pay more attention to water quality.
I used that home test and it did indicate problems, although I don't remember what specifically.
I dug into water quality just enough to go "lemme get a water filter" and then stopped thinking about it, so I don't have a lot of details.
You could look at https://www.hrv4training.com/ to measure your heart rate variability. I believe it uses your phone camera and is scientifically validated. Should be more affordable.
This would be great if it works. Could you say more about why you think it does? The website says it measures at the finger, and my understanding is the signal is fuzzy by that point.
I'm not really an expert on HRV, I just trusted the validation study here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315059917_Comparison_of_Heart_Rate_Variability_Recording_With_Smart_Phone_Photoplethysmographic_Polar_H7_Chest_Strap_and_Electrocardiogram_Methods
Every once in a while a measurement device improves my life a lot at little cost. This post is an attempt to share those data points and gather more, so we can all get a bunch of free gains.
The typical shape of problems solved by measurement devices is as follows: there's something I know might be an issue, but working on it feels very unrewarding. It's a combination of the costs of the issue being poorly quantified, not knowing how much any particular solution would help, and the solution requiring scarce resources like executive function. Measurement devices can help with any of these.
Note: I've provided links to the devices I use on the theory that something is better than nothing. I haven't necessarily tested competitors and there may be better options out there. Amazon links are affiliate, the others are not.
Devices that have helped me in particular
Air quality monitor. I live in California, which has wildfires. Back in 2020 these were especially bad. I closed my windows and wasn't willing to buy more air filters, so I didn't see the point in getting a monitor. At a friend's urging I got one anyway. Turns out my indoor air quality was such that I was willing to buy more filters after all, but also closing the windows didn't help that much. Once I had the new filters I could open my windows enough to let the CO2 dissipate, a huge quality of life improvement.
Once I had the monitor it paid off in other ways. I'd always been vaguely aware stovetop cooking and anything in a spray can were bad for air quality, but I lacked the bandwidth to change my behavior. Once these actions reliably triggered little red lights on the monitor I started turning on the stove vent more, and wearing a mask to use cleaning products. Eventually this formed a habit such that I sometimes remember to do those things even without the air monitor's prompting.
As a bonus, the in-house monitor saved me from having to check air quality on PurpleAir every day, and meant I caught the odd bad day in the off-season.
(This does depend on the monitor being accurate and having the right thresholds for greed/yellow/red. I chose this one mostly for its feature set, but PM2.5 cut-offs do seem right ).
Heart rate variability monitor: Heart rate variability, the delta in the space between your average heartbeat duration, is a pretty good and extremely responsive measure of stress (up to a point higher is better because it indicates more PSNS activity). Via the Lief I learned that nothing I do matters for HRV except breathing, and was able to focus my stress reduction efforts on that, and this indeed left me feeling less stressed than before.
Unfortunately, Lief is subscription only, and an expensive one at that. I only wanted to monitor my heart rate variability occasionally, so it wasn't worth the cost. When this next reaches the top of my list, I will look for a chest band I can own in exchange for money.
Watchband and ring fitness trackers will sometimes claim to report HRV, but they're not very good. Measuring HRV requires very precise measurements, and the signal of the heartbeat gets fuzzier the further you are from the heart. When I look next I'll be looking for something favored by HIIT nerdjocks, because HIIT also requires very sensitive measurements.
O2 Saturation Monitor. This has saved me 2 or 3 trips to urgent care, when my breathing felt constrained but my oxygen levels were fine. I imagine it would be even more useful if it got me into the ER when I didn't know I needed it.
More marginal tests
Nutrition testing. Everyone is very happy to tell you your nutrition is bad and this will kill you. It's hard to know what matters most to you, or whether your solutions are working. After my medical miracle, nutritional tests confirmed that a miracle did in fact occur, found which nutrients were still lagging, and helped me assess if particular treatments were working. These can be expensive, especially if you're testing for everything. They are probably unnecessary for most people, but if you're struggling nutritionally and especially if your attempts at treatments are having ambiguous results, numbers are helpful.
Every doctor I've seen tells me urine tests are better than blood for most nutrients and prescribes Metabolomix+. This test is missing several important nutrients (most importantly iron and vitamin D, but also B5, choline, and vitamin K), although my doctors only seem concerned about iron and vitamin D.
Home water testing: these are periodic tests rather than continuous monitors, and aren't cheap either. My doctor recommended this one but it's more expensive than the water filter I use, so maybe find a cheaper one or skip straight to filtering (the test did verify my filter worked, and this was pretty late in the filter's lifecycle). You can also use EWG to check your city's water data, although it will miss problems in your own pipes.
Reports from other people
Continuous glucose monitor. People report both that seeing the immediate spike in blood sugar after dessert changes their behavior in ways willpower never could, and that the monitor lets them identify the things they love that don't cause spikes. This is on my list to try.
CO2 Monitor. I tried this but it turned out my sense of stuffiness tracks CO2 extremely well, so it's not that useful. The air quality meter I mentioned above has one built in and since it's there I do use it to trade off pollution and CO2, but I wouldn't miss it if it were gone. Other people like them though, and they can be useful in arguments with less CO2-sensitive people.
FitBits et al: Steps seem super motivating to some of you.
Your suggestions here. Please add more in the comments.