We at Moodtraining really admire the work you’re doing on the Quantified Doctor to create more collaboration with patients via self-quantification and tracking.  How did you first get interested in self-quantification? What drew you to it?

Dr. Abramson:

I’ve been self-tracking for a long time, [...]]]> Quantified Doctor Paul Abramson, M.D. was interviewed by Carolyn Elliot of moodtraining.com:

We at Moodtraining really admire the work you’re doing on the Quantified Doctor to create more collaboration with patients via self-quantification and tracking.  How did you first get interested in self-quantification? What drew you to it?

Dr. Abramson:

I’ve been self-tracking for a long time, decades – but not with computers.  Just journaling, writing things down.  Self-monitoring isn’t a new concept.  It goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin, but now there are new tools.  It was about a year ago that I started using more tools …

You may read the entire interview here on moodtraining.com.

Exerpt:

A community of people is measuring and collecting every detail of their lives using new technology, [...]]]> Quantified Doctor Paul Abramson, M.D. was interviewed last night on KPIX Channel 5 News about self-tracking to improve his own health and that of his patients, along with several other members of the San Francisco Quantified Self community.

Exerpt:

A community of people is measuring and collecting every detail of their lives using new technology, and sharing their findings in the hopes of improving their health and the quality of their lives [...]

Dr. Abramson appears near the end of the video

Physician Paul Abramson believes there can be a benefit to all this self-tracking. He knows because he’s tried it.  “I’m in much more control, I think, of my own health,” said Dr. Abramson.

Using mobile Apps and wearable devices, Dr. Abramson has tracked his own health for roughly a year.  His blood pressure, weight, sleep, diet, exercise and more are streamed real time or synced wirelessly into an extensive data base. By analyzing patterns, the the doctor dropped 15 pounds, and discovered how sleep was affecting his headaches.

“What I’ve started to see is there are a lot of people with real medical problems where self-tracking could be very helpful,” said Dr. Abramson. doctor dropped 15 pounds, and discovered how sleep was affecting his headaches.

Link to KPIX video: Hacking Into Body Metrics on KPIX News

Various devices and apps that Dr. Abramson uses are pictured in the video:  BodyMedia FIT armband, Mymee app, Withings Blood Pressure Cuff, the BodyTrack platform, Zeo and others.

You may follow Dr. Abramson on Twitter as @paulabramsonMD or his self-tracking feed as @quantdoctor.

If you are interested in using self-tracking techniques as a part of comprehensive medical care in the San Francisco Bay Area, you may contact Dr. Abramson via his practice: My Doctor Medical Group.

Patients self-tracking symptoms, environmental stimuli and behaviors, to get information that allows them to take control of their own health. It seems like a no-brainer. Even more so if this is done in the context of a well-designed and monitored personal experiment with or without the support of a Quant Coach or [...]]]>

Patients self-tracking symptoms, environmental stimuli and behaviors, to get information that allows them to take control of their own health. It seems like a no-brainer. Even more so if this is done in the context of a well-designed and monitored personal experiment with or without the support of a Quant Coach or Quant-Friendly Doctor.

Great. Now how to get people to actually do the tracking?

On a technical level, the process of self-tracking is currently still quite cumbersome. Just as PCs were clunky and mostly used only by highly-motivated geeks in the mid-to-late 1970s, self-tracking technologies are in their infancy and currently require a lot of time, effort and expertise to implement in an effective way.

For example, consider the a modestly-complex project of monitoring physical activity, sleep, weight, mood, and pain level, and analyzing this data to discover the relationship between these variables. Perhaps to discover how physical activity and body composition affect sleep or pain. One could acquire a BodyMedia armband activity monitor, a Zeo sleep monitor, a Withings wireless weight scale, and perhaps use the Mymee app to actively track mood and pain. Each of these devices requires its own setup process, and configuration of a separate account on each company’s central server. Accessing the data requires separately downloading or extracting data from four separate technology platforms, and manually combining it in Excel or another data manipulation program.

One could try to use a data aggregation platform to facilitate the data visualization. RunKeeper can pull data from Zeo and Withings. Fluxtream can pull data from Withings and Zeo as well as Google Latitude, Twitter and other sources. Bodytrack can pull data from BodyMedia, Zeo, Mymee, and soon all the devices supported by Fluxtream. But setting up these platforms and their various connectors takes some tech savvy, and tools to automatically analyze the data are still very limited.

So what’s next?

The short-term plan is to develop ways to support people/patients to implement and analyze self-tracking experiments seamlessly. This may initially involve “mechanical turk” solutions using people to connect the current gaps in technology. But ultimately improved software will allow even non-geeks to get prompt and beautifully-presented self-tracking feedback, to make “N of 1″ personal experiments accessible to all who are interested.

Importantly, the unifying software tools need to be open source and not controlled by a device manufacturer or other entity that might restrict a user’s ability to control their own data, or aim to profit by secretly mining the data on the back end.

Beta testing is in process. Stay tuned!

Excerpt from April 2012 Delta Sky Magazine article by Mya Frazier, starting on p. 68:

“It’s only eight in the morning on a temperate, cloudy Friday in San Francisco, yet Dr. Paul Abramson’s [...]]]> The latest issue of Delta Sky Magazine features an article interviewing Paul Abramson MD, the Quantified Doctor, about self-tracking technologies:

Excerpt from April 2012 Delta Sky Magazine article by Mya Frazier, starting on p. 68:

“It’s only eight in the morning on a temperate, cloudy Friday in San Francisco, yet Dr. Paul Abramson’s day started hours ago. Roused from bed in the middle of the night by a patient’s page, he was in the ER by 4 a.m. But despite a demanding morning caring for others, Abramson didn’t have to neglect the fastidious tracking of his own health, even for a minute.

Abramson can instantly offer a detailed snapshot of his key health metrics, which are monitored daily. There are the basics–body weight, 156; blood pressure, 116 over 68–followed by a series of mood metrics based on a scale of 0 ot 4, such as agitation level, 1; optimism level, 3; energy level, 1. A sensor-enabled Body Media band worn on his left arm tracks physical activity, with 2,000-plus steps and 10 pull-ups logged to far. A food log app helps him tally the calories and nutrition in a breakfast of spinach and eggs. When he went to bed, a Zeo Sleep Manager, a thin black band with an embedded sensor worn as a headband, tracked sleep patterns, including REM and deep sleep, recording a dismal night with little rest: Abramson slept just three fours, waking six times due to repeated pages and phone calls with his patient…”

The article is not yet published online, just in the printed magazine. But it’s another positive mention for the growing self-tracking technology community centered around the Quantified Self movement.

Exciting things are in store in 2012 for the Quantified Doctor including updates on the open-source BodyTrack Project, Mymee app, integrating self-tracking into the doctor-patient relationship, the evolving role of the Quant Coach, and several exciting conferences in the fall.

Be sure to follow @quantdoctor on Twitter for the latest updates.

http://paulabramsonmd.brandyourself.com/

I met a British surgeon Nagabhushanam “Bobby” Peddi last night at the #wisdom2conf holiday event, CEO of Saagara. He’s created an app that leads you through [...]]]> Learning how to use breathing to improve health is one of the simplest and most important things I recommend to patients.  It’s also very cost-effective.

I met a British surgeon Nagabhushanam “Bobby” Peddi last night at the #wisdom2conf holiday event, CEO of Saagara. He’s created an app that leads you through breathing exercises (pranayama) to adjust your autonomic nervous system to favor a parasympathetic (rest-digest) state. It’s very configurable.

It’s easy to choose a setting similar to Dr. Weil’s “4-7-8″ breath if desired. I frequently prescribe this technique to help patients with anxiety and have even used it successfully to stop paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia in the ER (just as we were about to push adenosine). While I used to write instructions out for people in the office, or refer them to an Iyengar yoga teacher, I can now start by showing them this app which will lead them through it and track their progress.

Even better, the full version is (for now) free on iOS and Mac, and also available on Android:
http://www.saagara.com/health-tools/pranayama

Now we just have to get them to open their API so we can extract timestamped historical data into BodyTrack and real-time feedback into Mymee.

I presented some methods and results from my own self-tracking experiments, performed over the past 6 weeks, at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley Show & Tell at IDEO in Palo Alto.

What did I do?
1. Implemented a version of the “Paleo Diet” to [...]]]>

I presented some methods and results from my own self-tracking experiments, performed over the past 6 weeks, at the Quantified Self Silicon Valley Show & Tell at IDEO in Palo Alto.

What did I do?
1. Implemented a version of the “Paleo Diet” to change my body composition.
2. Self-tracked to assess the effects of the new diet, and to assess its safety.
3. Self-tracked to attempt to figure out triggers of headaches.

How did I do it?
1. No grains, no legumes, no added sugar, minimal fruit.  Lots of vegetables.  Nuts.  Grass-fed and organic animal products.
2. Tracked weight (Withings), blood pressure (Withings), optimism/agitation/energy/caffeine/carbs (Mymee app), food and people pictures (Mymee app), lipid subtyping (VAP from Quest Diagnostics), blood sugar indices (HgbA1c, Glycomark, fasting blood glucose from Quest Diagnostics), and other labs.
3. Tracked sleep (Zeo, BodyMedia), activity (BodyMedia, Garmin, RunKeeper), headaches (Mymee app), barometric pressure/particulates/light in bedroom (BodyTrack base station).
4. Aggregated and visualized my data using from these sources using the BodyTrack platform thanks to Anne Wright and Randy Sargent from Carnegie Mellon University.

Anne Wright also served as my Quant Coach, a role that proved very helpful for focusing my efforts and providing ongoing feedback and course corrections along the way.

What did I learn?

Link to Slides from Presentation on Slideshare

Embed from Slideshare:

I show here a visualization from the BodyTrack platform of my activity level (via BodyMedia armband), sleep (via We continue to experiment with self-tracking as a way to enhance individual insight, awareness, and potentially control over one’s own health and well-being.

I show here a visualization from the BodyTrack platform of my activity level (via BodyMedia armband), sleep (via Zeo), symptoms (via MyMee symptom tracker app on an iPad), and photographs of food and people taken in realtime via MyMee.

The data is fully navigable, and many other tracked variables can be brought in as needed.  The pictures allow the user to recall what was happening when various other measures become interesting.  This “data-assisted recall” seems to help provide meaning and context to what would otherwise be a bunch of numbers.

Some critical elements determined so far:

1. The data must be controlled by the self-tracker, and gathered only for the self-tracker.  They might choose to share it with helpers (coach, doctor) who are assisting with their experiment.  Otherwise, if privacy is unclear, there seems to be an impediment to the kind of full-disclosure that’s needed to achieve greater insight.

2. In this vein, an open-source  and individually-controlled data repository seems to be the best model, a la BodyTrack.

3. Subjective and photo data is critical to providing context and recall, which adds meaning to the numbers.

4. Experimental design for self-tracking experiments is critical, especially defining terms precisely to assist in gathering meaningful subjective data.  For example, tracking “mood” seemed to be too vague for me to get meaningful data.  After working with my Quant Coach (project collaborator Anne Wright of BodyTrack), I have found it more interesting and precise to track “agitation” and “optimism.”  More on this later.

Ok, back to the Medicine 2.0 conference where we will be discussing this on a panel and presenting more details later today.

An “epidermal electronic system” (EES) is a thin film with electronic circuits that mounts on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements, electrical currents, and other measurable signals from your body.  Research coming out this week in [...]]]> Are William Gibson’s visions close to becoming a real-world QS fantasy?  Or a privacy debacle?

An “epidermal electronic system” (EES) is a thin film with electronic circuits that mounts on your skin, designed to stretch, flex, and twist — and to take input from the movements, electrical currents, and other measurable signals from your body.  Research coming out this week in Science from labs in Illinois and San Diego proposes that this technology has arrived.

Of course there are a lot of questions raised by this photo: Where’s the power source? How is the data transmitted off-chip?  It’s likely that we’re a long way off from a seamless product.

But this technology (even if it’s years away from reality) raises the possibility of ubiquitous low-power sensors and actuators mounted to human bodies, measuring the various available signals and applying electric and magnetic fields to modify our physiologic states.

The applications proposed by its inventors are appealing: measuring sleep, heart rate, brain waves and such, all in the name of “advancing human health.”  It’s the holy grail of ubiquitious passive sensors that enable effortless quantification of your biometrics, state of mind and health.  Amazing.

But the article doesn’t mention the dozens of truly devious applications that immediately ran through my head.  If individuals apply this technology to themselves, it could be extremely useful.  But if it’s easy to apply to people without their knowledge or control…

Here’s a link to a more in-depth article: Article from io9

And a link to the abstract in Science