THE QUANTIFIED SELF MOVEMENT
A Merry Christmas for Researchers

“The life which is unexamined is not worth living” – Socrates in the Apology

Quantified Self devotees live by numbers:

A researcher from Liverpool tells how he learned about the effects on his body of calorie-laden sandwiches, drinking sessions and Christmas feasting by monitoring his heart rate non-stop for a year.
Wear a head band and let you brain waves be monitored so as to wake you at the proper time in your sleep cycle.
A long term calorie counting study has continually found (in rodents) that low calorie rodents live 25% longer than high calorie intake rodents, in human years the comparison is 120 years to about 80. A smartphone App. appears the next day.

Welcome to the sometimes wacky and often intriguing world of the Quantified Self movement, an eclectic band of hackers, geeks, fitness freaks, patients and early adopters that, from its birth in California in 2008, has grown into a global movement of more than 5,000 members in 11 countries. Recently 260 delegates gathered in Amsterdam to share their experiences at the first Quantified Self Europe conference.

In science, politics, medicine and many other spheres, data is routinely collected to fine-tune performance. The realm that has so far evaded the cult of numbers is our personal lives. The idea of someone keeping spreadsheets of data on their mood, health, diet, physical location, personal productivity and sleep patterns might in the past have attracted a certain amount of scorn.

That is changing and fast, if the self-quantifying vanguard is to be believed. Smartphones are already packed with sensors, from cameras and GPS to accelerometers and gyroscopes. A growing range of cheap consumer gadgets aimed specifically at self-trackers is being launched, such as the Zeo, which monitors sleep cycles, and the fitbit, which measures physical activity and estimates calorie burn.

sleep

At the Amsterdam gathering, Robin Barooah, 39, an English software and product designer who lives in Oakland, California, spoke about his experiment in which he claims to have lost 20kg of his original 100kg weight by writing either the word "lethargic" or "energised" on a flash card at 3pm every day for 18 months, depending on how he felt. He puts it down to improved self-awareness.

"I gradually noticed that my perception of some foods shifted from thinking they were delicious to starting to feel their heaviness and the effects they were going to have on me. The act of paying greater attention has an effect on your behaviour."

Christian Kleineidam from Berlin was left with reduced lung function following treatment for a serious spinal condition in 2002. Traditional treatments such as physiotherapy and an inhaler didn't help, so he began taking measurements with a device called a peak flow and forced expiratory volume monitor. This revealed that his lung function improved when he performed certain relaxation exercises. By focusing on these he says he improved his lung function by around 30%.

Dozens of personal experiments such as these were reported and discussed in Amsterdam. Their flaws, such as the likelihood of other, confounding factors being involved, are obvious. But proponents of a more individualised approach to health argue that traditional clinical trials also have flaws, such as producing results that are averaged over groups that may not apply to individuals with particular genetic make-ups or other variations. Some even talk of "hacking" their own bodies – using the more detailed information to change things for the better.

"We all look for information about how to improve things for ourselves," says Barooah.

"You can look to other people to provide advice, by going to the doctor or reading a book. However, by definition conventional, mass-produced knowledge is broad and non-specific. By collecting your own personal information you know it is appropriate to you as an individual."

Steve Dean of product innovation studio Prehype and organiser of the New York Quantified Self group, told conference participants about Asthmapolis, a system on which he worked as a designer. Asthmapolis links sensors attached to the inhalers used by asthma patients when they have attacks to smartphones, which gather data on where and when they are used. Tracking this information over time helps patients identify the triggers that make their conditions worse. Patient tests are due to start next year.

But it is the combination of data from large numbers of individuals that may be most likely to lead to new insights. Thousands of patients are carrying out their own crowdsourced comparisons of symptoms and treatments for more than 500 illnesses on the social networking health website CureTogether. For example, one of hundreds of data aggregations revealed that people who experienced vertigo in conjunction with migraines were four times as likely to have painful negative reactions when using the migraine drug Imitrex as those who did not have vertigo.

Sponsors of the conference included big names such as Philips, Vodaphone and Intel. Their funding provided for unusual refreshments including "weed grass" cocktails, which may or may not have been wheatgrass, and a table of fruit including exotic star and dragon fruit, and rambutan. The organisation and language was very Californian, with frequent breaks to facilitate "spaces for conversations" about our "journeys" as well as numerous spontaneous agenda changes.

Gary Wolf, a journalist and co-founder of the Quantified Self movement, argues that the combination of the proliferation of small, cheap sensors, portable computing and the emergence of social media is bringing about profound shifts that are laying the groundwork for self-quantification to enter the mainstream. He says the same early adopters who turned computers from scientific data-gathering machines into the core tools of our personal lives are the same species as the self-quantifying pioneers who are pushing personal data tracking as a logical and inevitable next step in human development.

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"Some decades ago computing was for doing calculations so that managers and scientists could better understand and run the world, but then it began to mean communication, self-expression, education, the development of personal knowledge," he says.

"We advanced users are not like other people. We are strange. Look at all the weird stuff we're willing to do. But advanced users teach new technologies to do new things. They are willing to use tools that are harder, but they use them for many of the same human purposes that everyone wants to use them for. We use them to sleep better, understand things about diet, our work and productivity, our learning, our moods.

"If we use our imaginations we can easily see how the homemade or complicated tools we use for self-tracking might have popular incarnations very soon."

Implications for the Researcher in us All

If it isn't already obviously to you, and it would be, the convergence of cheap, accessible monitoring systems and input devices held on the body, the ability to collect behavioural data will change dramatically in 2012 – imagine once the first wave of celebrities start to talk up their data collection fad, when facebook friends compare their quantified heart beat rhythms, Researchers in large companies already looking at the applications of freely traded, enthusiastically collected data – the potential here is enormous.

Here is some of what the conference produced:

Jenny Tillotson is working on “emotional clothing” that can sense how you’re feeling and boost your mood/energy or help you relax.
Ever thought of the idea of collecting silence, Danielle Roberts does.
Lisette Sutherland’s recipe for overcoming social anxiety? Habituation. Pick a social thing that scares you but that you enjoy doing, and keep doing it over and over again, even if it’s hard at first. You will learn to recognize the patterns of your feelings and begin to be able to insert a rational thought into the emotional loop – “this fear is not real!” – which will lessen the severity of the emotion.
A good reminder – not every pattern has meaning. Sometimes it’s just meaningless coincidence.
Jan Peter Larsen told us about patterns that predict addiction or depression relapse, and interventions to help prevent full relapse. The predicting patterns include sleep inconsistency, social passivity, and web surfing, both duration and types of sites visited. The interventions include inviting reflection on and awareness of your mood patterns, and facilitating the act of reaching out to other people for support.
Steve Dean showed how deconstructing behaviors into sequences of small, specific actions can help you design rituals that work for you in your daily life.
Richard Ryan presented research showing that emotions only last for 90 seconds, unless you keep amplifying them.
One of my own insights from the weekend is that carefully managing my inputs (sensory, social, emotional and informational) is important to not triggering destructive or negative emotional states.
Marco van Heerde pointed out that sometimes too much precision in your data isn’t helpful for building awareness. It’s OK to be vague!
And finally a wise insight from Robin Barooah: the problem with research isn’t that it’s too slow, it’s that existing research isn’t put into practice. How true.

happy

Now we have some time over the Summer – maybe take a look how quantifying yourself could improve your performance and maybe we'll all be able to keep our 2012 resolutions – when we track them infinitely.

How I went from 2,000 words a day to 10,000

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

Catherine Hooper - Hour-Tracking for Priority Optimisation

http://vimeo.com/groups/quantifiedself/videos/32106581

Wall street journal

http://quantifiedself.com/2008/12/the-new-examined-life-self-t/

Quantified Self Guide and Tools

http://quantifiedself.com/guide/

Happy Christmas to all and thank you to all from the team at AFS.