Sara Riggare is a QS meetup organizer (Stockholm), PhD student, and Parkinson’s patient. At the 2011 QS Europe conference she met Caspar Addyman, a psychologist and researcher. Together they’ve partnered on a few projects to create self-tracking tools for the Parkinson’s community. Watch their Ignite presentation at the 2013 QS Europe Conference to learn more:

Make sure to register for our 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference. We hope to see you there!

The post Caspar Addyman and Sara Riggare on Tracking Parkinson’s appeared first on Quantified Self.

From Gary Wolf

Apple Gives Massive Nod to Wearable Tech in New iOS7 Update: This analysis of iOS7 changes for wearable technologies argues that the iPhone’s future as a QS hub matters more than the much hyped and hypothetical Apple Watch.

“Drawing Dynamic Visualizations” [video] – Many clues here in this Bret Victor talk about the future of understanding our personal data. Be sure to check out the supplemental material on his website.

The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, by Steven Shapin: I’m finding this book very influential in shaping my reaction to some of the pious statements about “real science” that I encounter in discussions of the Quantified Self movement. Here’s an interview with Shapin that includes a link for the book.

From Ernesto Ramirez

Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies: A thoughtful research article by Deborah Lupton exploring to sociocultural implications on self-tracking on health and identity.

A Timeline of Smartphone-enabled Health Devices by Mobihealthnews: A great look back at the how far the field of mHealth has come since 2009.

Lifeloggers by Memoto [video]: This short documentary explores the world of lifelogging through various interviews with experts such as Gordon Bell and Steve Mann.

A Personal API by Naveen Selvadurai: Naveen, co-founder of Foursquare, has started to open up his data in the form of an “personal API.” He’s challenged developers and the broader QS community to see what they can do with this data. Right now his API allows access to sleep, steps, weight, fuel (Nike Fuelband), and places.

We’ve also noticed two open challenges that might appeal to the QS community:

The Economist-Lumina Foundation Quantified Work Challenge: The Economist and the Lumina Foundation are asking for your thoughts on what “potential objective inputs or data and potential methods of collecting and reporting that information that organizations could use to build a personalized “skills tracker” for individual employees.”

Chart.js Personal Dashboard Challenge: Use the open source chart.js javascript visualization library to create your own charts and graphs based on your personal data.

The post What We Are Reading appeared first on Quantified Self.

Watch (or listen to) our conversation with Charles below then make sure to read our short interview to learn more about the story behind LUMOback.

Q: How do you describe Lumoback? What is it?

LUMOback is a posture and movement sensor that you wear around your waist.  It gives you real time feedback in the form of a vibration when you are slouching, both when you are standing and sitting.  It also connects wirelessly to a mobile application, where it tracks whether you have been straight or slouching, in addition to sitting, standing, walking, running, and sleep positions.

One key feature of our mobile application is LUMO, the real time avatar.  LUMO mimics what you are doing in real time, and gives you real time visual feedback so that you can understand and be aware of what position your body is in.

Q: What’s the backstory? What led to it?

Andrew Chang, Monisha Perkash, and myself were funded by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors to find a big problem to solve, and build a growth business around it.  We didn’t have to look very far to find the right opportunity.

Andrew, one of the cofounders, has had chronic lower back pain for the past 11 years, and nothing really seemed to help him.  He went to physicians, physical therapists, chiropractors, and tried acupuncture and other minor procedures.  It wasn’t until he learned about postural correction by taking a set of posture classes where he started to understand how critical posture was in alleviating his back pain.  In fact, once he began paying attention to his posture, his back pain significantly improved.

We as humans were designed through evolution to move, but now we spend most of our time sitting, and in most cases, sitting poorly.  This means that improving posture and encouraging more activity can have significant impact on people’s health and wellbeing.  Studies show that back health and posture are correlated, as is posture and confidence / attractiveness.  It’s no wonder that physical therapists, chiropractors, and spine physicians stress the importance of posture.

The challenge of improving posture is twofold:  1) Most people have very little body awareness, let alone understanding their sitting and standing postures, and 2) Most people don’t have the resources or the time to take posture classes.  This is where we realized that we could use technology to solve this problem, so we started prototyping and iterating, and this is what led us to create LUMOback.

Q: What impact has it had? What have you heard from users?

Users tell us that LUMOback has changed their lives, and either that their back pain has gone away through using the product or has significantly been reduced.  People also frequently tell us that they are now very aware of their slouchy posture, which leads to posture correction, and again, awareness is the key element involved in making postural changes.

Q: What makes it different, sets it apart?

In addition to telling people whether their posture is straight or slouched, we can tell them whether they are sitting, standing, walking, running, and their sleep positions.  The ability to differentiate between sitting and other activities is a clear differentiator for what we do.

LUMOback iOS application

Q: What are you doing next? How do you see Lumoback evolving?

We are constantly making improvements to LUMOback, from the application experience to the accuracy of our ability to detect different biomechanical states.  We pride ourselves on being open to feedback and are constantly trying to improve and iterate on our product based on what our users tell us.  This is the most exciting part — truly solving problems and needs that people have.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

We really are at a point in time now where mobile technologies will help us to solve challenging health problems in ways we couldn’t have imagined even several years ago.  This is what gets the LUMO team super excited!

Product: LUMOback
Website: www.lumoback.com
Price: $149

This is the 19th post in the “Toolmaker Talks” series. The QS blog features intrepid self-quantifiers and their stories: what did they do? how did they do it? and what have they learned?  In Toolmaker Talks we hear from QS enablers, those observing this QS activity and developing self-quantifying tools: what needs have they observed? what tools have they developed in response? and what have they learned from users’ experiences? If you are a toolmaker and want to participate in this series please contact Ernesto Ramirez.

The post Toolmaker Talk: Charles Wang (LUMOback) appeared first on Quantified Self.

The post Sara Cambridge on Crowdsourced Dietary Ratings appeared first on Quantified Self.

Today’s guest post come to us from Eric Jain, the lead developer behind Zenobase and a wonderful contributor to our community. 

At last month’s QS Europe 2013 conference, developers gathered at a breakout session to compile a list of common obstacles encountered when using the APIs of popular, QS-related services. We hope that this list of obstacles will be useful to toolmakers who have developed APIs for their tools or are planning to provide such APIs.

1. No API, or incomplete APIs that exposes only aggregate data, and not the actual data that was recorded.
2. Custom authentication mechanisms (instead of e.g. OAuth), or custom extensions (e.g. for refreshing tokens with OAuth 1.0a).
3. OAuth tokens that expire.
4. Timestamps that lack time zone offsets: Some applications need to know how much time has elapsed between two data points (not possible if all times are local), or what e.g. the hour of the day was (not possible if all times are converted to UTC).
5. Can’t retrieve data points going back more than a few days or weeks, because at least one separate request has to be made for each day, instead of being able to use a begin/end timestamp and offset/limit parameters.
6.  Numbers that don’t retain their precision (1 != 1.0 != 1.00), or are changed due to unit conversion (71kg = 156.528lbs = 70.9999kg?).
7. No SSL, or SSL with a certificate that is not widely supported.
8. Data that lacks unique identifies (for track-ability, or doesn’t include its provenance (if obtained from another service).
9. No sandbox with test data for APIs that expose data from hardware devices.
10. No dedicated channel for advance notifications of API changes.

This list is by no means complete, but rather a starting point that we hope will kick off a discussion around best practices.

The post APIs: What Are The Common Obstacles? appeared first on Quantified Self.

Robert Carlsen used to be an amateur bike racer. When he moved to New York and stopped racing he found that his weight was slowly creeping up. He was still leading an active lifestyle, but he soon realized that most of daily food choices were the result of guess work. In this video, filmed at the New York City QS Meetup, Robert explains how he used different apps and tools to track his caloric inputs and outputs in order to move towards his goal weight.

Tools:
Body Weight Simulator
Lose It!
Runkeeper
Strava
MobileLogger
Withings Scale + App
Nike Fuelband

The post Robert Carlsen on Tracking Weight appeared first on Quantified Self.

Taking the Guesswork out of Designing for Walkability by Xiongbing Jin & Fanis Grammenos: How should we design urban environments? In this article, the authors explore using agent-based modeling to test (a priori) what urban designs positively influence walking in a community.

The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist by Susan Young: Russell Poldrack is a neuroscientist and imaging expert at the University of Texas. He’s currently in the middle of a massive self-tracking project which includes bi-weekly brain scans (MRI).

Blood Glucose Monitor Data Pushed to Smart Watch by Mike Szczys: This short post on the excellent Hackaday site introduces us to Don, an enterprising hardware hacker and diabetic. He’s spending some time attempting to send his blood glucose monitor data to his smartwatch and writing about it here.

Photo Lifelogging: Why I’m Skeptical by Peter Lewis: We’re moving quickly into a word with millions of wearable cameras. Peter, a QS meetup organizer, expounds on this trend and what what might happen when we’re all  able “ to censor — sorry, “curate” — [our] own photo streams.”

Home Tweet Home: A House with it’s own Voice on Twitter by Rachel Metz: The Internet of Things isn’t the future, it’s already here. Read about how Tom Coates has “wired” his home for constant data tracking and communication.

Personalized Medicine vs Guideline-based Medicine by Jeffrey Goldberger & Alfred Buxton: A short, but very interesting article that begins to explain the competing ideas behind the design and implementation of personalized vs guideline-based medicine.

Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Rewriting Race, Medicine, and Human History [pdf] by Priscilla Wald: “[If] we understand the power of the stories we can better understand the debates surrounding race and genomic medicine, which, in turn, can help us make better ethical and policy decisions and be useful in the practices of science and medicine.” (submitted by Whitney Erin Boesel)

(If you’re interested in more academic papers related to self-tracking and Quantified Self please join our Mendeley Group).

The post What We Are Reading appeared first on Quantified Self.

The post My Fitness Pal Api Calls appeared first on Quantified Self.

Jared Chung was curious about how he was spending his days after he transitioned from his role as a consultant into his new startup venture. Inspired by pervious Quantified Self talks he decided to start tracking his time and his daily activities (work, exercise, sleep, etc.) using Google Calendar. This ongoing tracking project has helped him identify how he spends his day and how that compares to his planned activities. Watch this great talk filmed at the QS Boston Meetup to learn more about what Jared learned and how you can get started tracking your time

Tools:

• Google Calendar
• GCal2Excel (export tool)

The post Jared Chung on Tracking Time appeared first on Quantified Self.

We’re excited to announce our fifth Quantified Self conference, to be held October 10-11, 2013 at the beautiful San Francisco Presidio Officer’s Club located the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Registration is now open.

The 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference is our fifth conference for users and toolmakers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be another “working meeting” for the QS community (90+ groups worldwide now), where we will gather, inspire, and learn from each other as we share and collaborate on self-tracking projects. This year we’re welcoming 500 attendees.

If you are a self-tracker, advanced user, designer, tech inventor, entrepreneur, journalist, scientist, health professional, or  just interested in Quantified Self, please join us for a weekend of collaboration and inspiration! Like last year, we will have a limited number of scholarship registrations available for people if registration price is a barrier. If you either need financial assistance or would like to sponsor a scholarship for a grateful self-tracker to attend the conference, write to Ernesto here.

We run our conference as a carefully curated unconference. That means that all of our sessions come from our attendees. As always, we are very much looking forward to learning from your self-tracking story and we invite you to share your knowledge. When you register for the conference, we will ask you if and what you’d like to present. You can email us to tell us what you’d like to present, but first please this brief description of how we program our QS conference. We will be announcing speakers and topics in the coming weeks, and we hope to see you in San Francisco!

The post Announcing the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference appeared first on Quantified Self.