Meet Laurie Frick
Laurie Frick is an American neuroscientist who decided to monitor her everyday actions and experiences with the help of the Quantified Self website. However, her exploring nature led her to a deeper examination of the results, and the data she collected made her ask some hard questions such as “Do we make our quantifiable patterns or do they make us?” These concerns, combined with Laurie’s artistic background triggered the creation of a colorful and literally unique collection of abstract images, representing self-tracking data and statistics. 

Language of sleep

Nicholas Felton, a graphic designer in the self-tracking world!
Nicholas Felton is the co-founder of Daytum.com (one of the websites we presented on our previous post about lifelogging), and currently a member of the product design team at Facebook. His love for data and charts was the inspiration for a project he calls “annual report” and in which he visualizes information drawn from his memory, calendar, photos and also other online services that he uses to keep records of his music-listening, movie-renting and photo activities. According to Nicholas, when he created the first Annual Report, he thought that it would be primarily interesting to only his friends and family, but surprisingly, it was also popular among people who he had never met.  As a result, since then he has been dedicating increasing amounts of time to documenting and charting the passage of each year. When asked where he finds inspiration for his patterns, Nicholas answers “From traveling and reading. From modernist design, nature, math, geometry, science and music. In obsessiveness, language, humor, little moments, simplicity and elegance.”

A Quantified Self Exhibition
As part of Innovation Dublin 2011, Dublin City Council’s The LAB Gallery brought together some of Dublin’s most innovative artists to collaborate with Shimmer Research , a company that designs, develops and manufactures wearable wireless sensors,  to make an art exhibition inspired by the Quantified Self movement. For example, artist Michelle Browne was inspired by the ways in which the human body reacts in situations of high risk and decided to document a game of poker. Using Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) to monitor physiological reactions to the game, she gathered data that was then fed back into a chair positioned at the end of a diving board. Motorized elements in the board translated the physiological responses of the players into data visualization.

(If you want to learn more about the Quantified Self Exhibition, click here to download the Quantified Self book!)

What about you? Have you ever created an artistic representation of your tracking data?

The Carrot is a website dedicated to improving your health through self-tracking and coaching.  As they put it themselves, “You record what’s going on and we’ll help you understand what it means”. What caught our attention especially about The Carrot is how it combines a very friendly and intuitive user interface, rich with social functions, and a strong commitment to giving advice grounded on science and protecting user privacy.

The basic purpose of The Carrot is to put at your disposal trackers for a large variety of metrics, ranging from body metrics like weight, blood pressure, glucose level, etc. to other types of data like how much exercise you do or how much alcohol you consume.

A small sample of the trackers available at The Carrot. Users choose which ones they want to display on their personal homepage.

Once you start tracking, you can also enroll in one of the health and fitness programs designed by The Carrot. Programs available at the moment include, among others, weight loss, diabetes management, asthma management, smoking cessation coaching… If you want to stop smoking for instance, The Carrot will start by helping you identify your reasons for wanting to quit smoking and what triggers the desire for a cigarette. Then, they will recommend you a series of trackers to use to monitor your progress and attract your attention to common elements that play a role in a successful attempt to quit. You can also add the medication you are using to help yourself (and track your consumption of course).

Once you have entered all this information, you will receive advice and coaching based upon the data you enter day after day and drawing from the expertise of the University of California at San Francisco Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. You will be invited to join the community of other The Carrot users who are on the same path as you and to share your data with them. The sharing is entirely up to you though, and at any point you can put an end to it, in which case all your previous data entries will become private again.

The weight graph on The Carrot

So where do Withings come in? The Carrot has integrated with our devices, so that you can now have your weight, body-fat and blood pressure data updated automatically and instantly on The Carrot’s trackers every time you use the Withings scale or blood pressure monitor. Self-tracking has never been easier and with The Carrot you get access to some of the best information and advice available to help you manage a chronic disease or simply to reach a goal you have set for yourself to improve your health.

The Carrot is also available as an iPhone app that lets you keep up with your trackers on the go.

Crowdsourcing between patients
A notable example of crowdsourcing between patients is the Health Tracking Network. This network was developed to help people from across the world share data and monitor common illnesses like influenza, gastroenteritis or common cold. Its users spend 2-3 minutes per week answering questions about illness symptoms and other topics.

The three main goals of the Health Tracking Network are:

• To identify factors related to common illnesses;
• To promote members’ health by enabling them to track their personal outcomes easily on simple graphs;
• To generate donations to charities chosen by members.

Another example of crowdsourcing between patients is CureTogether. Alexandra Carmichael, a scientist (and also the director of Quantified Self) who is living with chronic pain, created CureTogether in July 2008. This platform helps patients share and track data and exchange experiences. Right now, it offers quantitative information and open infographics on over 500 medical conditions and gathers people from over 110 countries.

Crowdsourcing between health professionals
Not only patients can benefit from crowdsourcing. It can also be extremely helpful between doctors : thanks to joint effort, variety of expertise and collective knowledge, they are able to reach a diagnosis that they would not find otherwise.

Voxmed is a social media platform that allows professionals to share opinions, seek advice and connect with their colleagues. The members can learn about conferences, read about research, post their publications, ask questions, participate in forums, share patient cases and even get paid by industry sponsors for sharing their expertise and participating in surveys.

Medting on the other hand, encourages its members to share not only their experiences but also medical images and videos, in order to build clinical cases online.  It allows doctors from all over the world to work together and share knowledge, by offering collaborative workspaces. Until now, 14,819 clinical cases have been registered on Medting and 21,854 multimedia files have been uploaded.

And you, would you like to take part in some health crowdsourcing projects? Would you appeal to crowdsourcing to find a solution to a personal health problem or do you feel that such matters are too private?

We discussed before on the blog the ChildCount+ initiative that aims to reduce child and maternal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa by using SMS to coordinate community health workers. SMS are also used in the “SMS for life” initiative, also in Central Africa, to help fight malaria. One of the key issues of malaria medicine distribution in rural areas of Africa is the difficulty of managing stocks in remote health centers. Regular means of reporting are slow and not always accurate and forecasting demand is extremely difficult when even the care providers have irregular interaction with the people under their purview. By designing templates for SMS reports and sticking to a weekly schedule, the local authorities were able to greatly improve the availability of antimalarial medicine.

E-health technology is also used in several projects around the world for tracking and managing the outbreak of epidemics. Developed by the non-profit organization DataDyne, EpiSurveyor is a tool that works on most phones and that lets you create custom forms that you can then send to a list of contacts for them to fill. While the system can be used for any sort of survey, it was first designed as a way to retrieve data quickly and in a form that is easy to exploit during an epidemic outbreak or some other emergency situation. EpiSurveyor is cheap, easy to use and has been deployed in over 160 countries in the world. For instance, EpiSurveyor has been used in 2010 to monitor the vaccination effort in Kenya against the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

Healthcare workers use EpiSurveyor in Ethiopia

Another innovation, born with the Internet generation, is crowdsourcing. It turns out that even with very complex matters, many times tens of thousands of untrained brains can be better than a few hundred qualified ones. For instance, in August 2011, scientists released a web-based game named “Foldit” where players were challenged to find how molecules would fold onto each other in three dimensions. The ultimate goal was to try to find how an enzyme with a structure similar to the aids virus behaved, which would help understand how the disease itself functioned. It took the players three weeks to succeed where scientists had failed for ten years.

The user interface of Foldit.

The problem was not the scientists’ intelligence, rather the issue was that computers are just not very good at spatial reasoning and the researchers themselves cannot afford the hundreds of hours necessary to solve such puzzles: their very specialized skills always find a more pressing use. By multiplying the available brain power by a factor of a thousand and using modern tools to create a user-friendly interface and a social environment to debate and compare various solutions, crowdsourcing made it possible to make progress and crack the puzzle.

And you, can you think of any other global health issues that could benefit from connected health technology?

Turn your life into infographics
With the app and website Daytum, you can collect, categorize, visualize, and communicate your everyday data. It allows you to get the bigger picture of your everyday life, through personalized statistics of anything you wish to keep track of – the uses are limitless! You can create a personal dashboard, an event, keep track of sports scores, or use Daytum as a corporate tool. All in all, Daytum turns your daily life into infographics and is great tool to represent in a simple, artistic and intuitive way your unique information. It shows you just how interesting and limitless self-tracking can be!

You want to take it a step further? Biogrify is a new web application (currently in beta testing) that gives you the chance to use interactive infographics and create a visual snapshot of your life. Because life is an evolving story!

Lifelogging as a means of motivation
DidThis is an app that aims to motivate you to do your everyday activities. It can help you track what you did and share it visually with your friends by answering simple questions like “what?” and “how much?”. With DidThis, you can take pictures to log your achievements and grab the opportunity to cheer your friends up on theirs!

Snap pictures of your favourite moments
Would you like to have your own, personalized calendar? One that will remind you of the most important moment of each day? With My365 you can save your favourite moments as a photo and share them with your friends! Having fun with your loved ones, spending time with family, going shopping, attending a special event or anything else you can think of that is worth keeping as a memory!

Timeline your life
With services like AllofMe or Dipity you can organize your favourite moments by date and time. Your can create engaging timelines that can host video, photos, audio, text, links, locations or timestamps and can even manage multiple timelines. AllofMe users can tag faces within the photos and navigate through timelines manually or in an automated slideshow.

Lifelogging represents your personalized digital tale. Whether you decide to keep it private or share it with the world is completely up to you! If you want to get a better idea of how much lifelogging can change your life, we discussed here Gordon’s Bell research project who aims to capture as many memories of his life as possible.

So which type of lifelogging do you prefer? Do you keep your life story offline and private within a notebook on your bookcase or do you share it with your friends?

Terms and conditions

Then it started happening to some members of our staff as well. Fear was spreading at Withings: who were those mysterious weight-takers? Was it something that was happening with other, unconnected scales as well and their owners just were not aware?

We suspected ghosts at first, but experts told us they’re usually weightless.

We were about to double the team working on the Smart Baby Monitor just so that we would finally have a tool to catch the culprits in the act. Ultimately though, that didn’t prove necessary.

Turns out it was the housekeepers.

When cleaning up the homes of their employers while they were at work, some of them had taken the habit of weighing themselves on the Withings scale that was there. Since they did not have a user profile associated with the scale, all the measures showed up in the dashboard or the mobile app as “unassigned” at times where the owner of the scale wasn’t home.

It’s not an isolated phenomenon either: many users reported us that they had noticed it in their own dashboard and no less than four members of our staff know that their housekeeper uses their scale regularly.

A facetious customer even created a Twitter account in secret for the cleaning lady he employs. “Madame T.” now tweets her weight every week and doesn’t know about it. We can’t really condone such prank, but the account has been going on for over two years now and has 189 followers at the time of the writing of this article.

And you, do you also have some unexplained weigh-ins that show up on your dashboard?

Infographic: The rise of the digital doctor
This infographic examines how physicians’ use of social media has evolved during recent years. As of 2011, 90% of US physicians are using social media (both professional and personal use), and 92% of them state that they make use of social media to learn from other experts and from their peers. One third of them have received a friend request from one of their patients – 75% of them declined the invitation, however.

A fridge with the mind of a dietician
LG has unveiled a smart refrigerator with a smart manager that allows every family member to have a profile and helps him or her maintain diets. The fridge also lets you know what’s in your fridge, where it’s located, and when it’s going to expire as well as proposing recipes that can be made with the ingredients inside while taking the personal profiles’ age, gender, weight and BMI into account – convenient when you’re out grocery shopping!

Study: Mobile access to health data rose 125% in 2011
In the middle of January, a comScore study revealed that the number of people accessing their health data from their mobile phones has grown by 125 percent in 2011. The study showed that 3 in 5 of these users are under the age of 35. These statistics have lead comScore to report health as one of the fastest growing segments in mobile device usage.

Portable electronic device to reduce blood clots
Sky Medical has developed a wrist sized, self-adhesive band called Geko, which triggers the body’s built-in mechanism to increase blood flow to reduce the risk of blood clots. The band attaches to the back of the knee and small neuromuscular electrical impulses stimulates the nerve behind the knee to active the calf muscle pumps.

MedHelp is one of the most popular websites in the US for health-related information and one of the largest communities for visitors to exchange and find answers to a wide variety of health-related questions. With dedicated forums for several dozens of health conditions and a team of doctors and health professionals ready to provide answers to all sorts of queries, MedHelp is great place to find information, reassurance, or form bonds between people afflicted by the same health issues.

MedHelp has recently developed new tools for their users, most notably health trackers and mobile applications, and that is where Withings comes in. MedHelp has created a weight tracker and has integrated it with our API. It means that all MedHelp users can now add this weight tracker to their profile and connect it with their Withings scale (you can learn more about the process to connect your Withings scale to your MedHelp weight tracker here).

The MedHelp online weight tracker

This way, you can have access at any time to all your weight history and use it with the advice and information provided on MedHelp to help yourself achieve your fitness goals. MedHelp has also released last week a mobile app for iPhone and Android dedicated specifically to weight loss, MyDietDiary. With MyDietDiary, you can keep your diet in your pocket at all time, and of course your weight in the app can be updated automatically every time you use your Withings scale! Just connect your scale with the weight tracker on MedHelp.org and your data will be synchronized with the mobile application as well.

MyDietDiary is available on iOS and Android.

We will continue to make partnerships with all sorts of companies and websites involved in self-tracking or coaching to ensure that you can do whatever you want with your personal data! Check our blog for other announcements very soon!

Beethoven’s For Elise!

For Elise won with 35% of the votes. You can (re-)listen to this Beethoven’s classic right below. You will receive a notification in the WithBaby app in the coming hours to reboot your Smart Baby Monitor and enable the new song.

We hope your baby enjoys it!