Graphs, tables and other ways of representing data should be there to help you make decisions, not to just look cool. So yeah, go ahead and collect toilet flushing data; maybe you'll find something interesting there. But the way it's presented now, most of that data is useless. The number of toilet flushes since today morning doesn't really tell you anything without context. Even "x% above/below average of last week", or better, a sparkline of previous week's worth of data would give you some baseline that could let you interpret that flush count in a useful way.

Basically, my gripe with people in IoT and Quantified Self is that they totally cargo-cult graphs and dashboards.

Wow.

Toilet flushes: a significant change in the frequency of toilet flushes may indicate the spread of communicable diseases such as gastroenteritis, or community health problems like food poisoning.

Apple-z: Clearly someone is having a lot of problems with whatever software they are using. There is a UX optimisation opportunity there.

Well, you can't learn anything from just a number of today's flushes. With a proper chart graphing frequency over time and emphasizing changes, sure. But that's not what you get on the dashboard, at least without clicking. The lone number is useless.

> Apple-z: Clearly someone is having a lot of problems with whatever software they are using. There is a UX optimisation opportunity there.

Well, maybe. You can't tell from a lone number. Again, the graphs you can find when you click around could be useful, but not what you get by default.

Information is useless if it doesn't help you make decisions.