Adam Loving on Featbeat

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has motivated him to continue his pushup/situp routine, and keeping his system simple has helped him uncover some funny problems for future improvement. (Filmed by the Seattle QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

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Toolmaker Talk: Ross Larter (MoodPanda)

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Rajiv Mehta

About three years ago, Gary Wolf wrote a detailed post on Measuring Mood — some tools are complicated enough to get you grouchy! Gallup goes through a lot of trouble to gauge the US happiness level on a daily basis. Others take a simple approach, such as Eric Kennedy’s recent talk at the Seattle QS meetup on Tracking Happiness.

Ross Larter believes an emphasis on simplicity and community (especially of people who you don’t know elsewhere) has been key to broad acceptance of his happiness-tracking MoodPanda.

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

Larter: MoodPanda.com is a mood tracking website and iphone app. Tracking is very simple: you rate your happiness on a 0-10 scale, and optionally add a brief twitter-like comment on what’s influencing your mood.

MoodPanda is also a large community of friendly people, sharing their moods, celebrating each others’ happiness, and supporting each other when they’re down.

People post many times a day – some tracking their mood from the moment they wake to the point their head hits the pillow at night! We organize people’s posts into their personal mood diary where they can view it many different ways: graphically, as a mood feed, broken down by metrics and even location based on a map.

Q: What’s the back story? What led to it?

Larter: MoodPanda got started in a pub in Bristol, England. A friend was asking people round the table how their day was and somebody replied with a 10/10.  My response was if today was the best day ever what happens if tomorrow is the same as today but then something else amazing happens (I think it included the “pussy cat dolls”), and we chatted for a while on this. The next day I started thinking about the question and told Jake (Co-Founder) about the idea and it went from there. We both work in software development so building the site was not an issue.

We are on MoodPanda version 3 at the moment. For the first 2 versions of the site we built it to track just your own mood. It was only once we added commenting and “hugs” to the current version that we realised that people wanted the interaction with each other. This is when our user based really started to grow.

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

Larter: Since the iPhone app has gone live it is growing quickly with many thousands of new user every month, over 60% now come from the Apple app store. We’re seeing about 1000 active user ratings a day. Hugs are a very popular feature. Panda users give out hundreds a day.

One thing we’ve learned is that there seems to be a strong demand for a place online where people can share their feelings with others who don’t know them in “real life”, people who won’t judge them. We see this in the data: only about 35% of mood ratings are passed through to Facebook and only 2% to Twitter. And we’ve heard this directly from users who have posted that its nice to talk to people that are interested in mood and wellbeing and don’t judge them.

Feedback from users has been fantastic, and in some cases very heartwarming. We’ve even had users tell us that they’ve “lived with years of hurt until they discovered MoodPanda”.

We’ve now got so many users in the UK that our mood map is pretty representative. Our UK live mood map was quite similar to the UK Government official one from last year. We also put together a nice infographic of all of our data from 2011.

We are always trying out new ideas, and some have not been well received. We had done some complicated graphs and visualization in the past, and we’ve learned that keeping it simple is the key to moodpanda.

I also never quite realised how much time is needed after all the technical work is done. I spend a ton of time talking on the radio, public speaking, blogging, twittering, etc. about MoodPanda.

Q: What makes it different, sets it apart?

Larter: What makes MoodPanda stand apart are its simplicity and community. Other mood tracking apps are very clinical and can often be intimidating to people first trying to track their mood. We keep it simple: rate your happiness from 0-10 and, if you want, say a few words about what is influencing your mood. The design and ethos of MoodPanda has been carefully cultivated to create a friendly, open and easy first step into happiness tracking.

The large community of “moody pandas” is the other major feature, as other mood tracking apps (like our first 2 versions) are private. We of course have users who want to remain private, but 92% of our users are posting as part of of the community. We have people giving “panda hugs” and commenting with help and advice constantly in the site and genuine caring friendships are being formed constantly. We’re working hard to understand what helps this community aspect of MoodPanda and build on it.

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

Larter: We recently started tracking hashtags so we could do stats on the sentiment of people’s comments that linked to the mood ratings. We’ve found that #coffee, #friends, and #food are associated with more happiness, and #sick and #work with less. We’re wondering whether we will learn whether some brands are strongly associated with mood (for example whether new #coke is good or bad) in ways that you can’t learn from normal brand sentiment tools.

We are working on the android app, and we’ve got a lot of ideas in the development pipeline involving more community features and technologies like an API.

Jake and I still have to go to work at our day jobs, but MoodPanda is a project that we both care deeply about. We’ve set a budget of $100 a month to spend on MoodPanda, so we do everything ourselves and get as creative as we can.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

Larter: Just a big thanks to you guys and girls at quantified self, its nice to talk to others that are as excited and interested in QS, if people continue to use moodpanda it to make themselves happier, we know we have done a good job!

Product: MoodPanda
Website: http://moodpanda.com
Platform: web, iPhone
Price: free

This is the ninth 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, contact Rajiv Mehta at rajivzume@gmail.com 

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Alan Bachers on Optimal Neurology

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Alan Bachers is an expert in neurofeedback training, which he comfortingly describes as helping the brain learn how to calibrate itself. He suggests that this training accelerates the process of getting into meditative or other desirable mental states, and can possibly help a medicated brain learn to function without medication. In the video below, he does a fascinating live demonstration of the NeurOptimal system on an audience member, with on-screen visualizations of the volunteer’s brain activity. I’d love to see how my brain looks with this tool! (Filmed by the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

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New Quantified Self Meetups

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Christian Kleineidam

There are two new Quantified Self meetup comming up in Germany:

On takes place on the 1st February in Munich.

The other on the 7th February in Hamburg.

Last month there was also another European country that had its QS Meeting:

The Czech Republic.

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What We Are Reading

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Here is this week’s QS reading list. Hope you enjoy:

Thanks to Ernesto Ramirez, Ed Dench, and James Wilson. If you’re reading something interesting you want to share, submit it to us here.

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Quantified Self 101: Make it SMART

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Ernesto Ramirez

So here we are again with another QS101 post. I thought today I would walk you through a concept* that you may find useful for getting started on the path to self tracking. As a behavioral scientist I get a lot of people asking me about goals – how to set them and how to achieve them. I always fall back on a course I taught as a graduate student aptly titled, “Psychological Skills for Optimal Performance.” During that course I taught undergraduates different concepts related to sports and exercise psychology, and one of those was the SMART system. I think this system, beside being a clever use of an acronym, could be useful to your self-tracking practice.** So what does SMART stand for?

S is for Specific. When you decide to track something it is best to choose something that is specific rather than general. For example, you might be interested in your cardiovascular health and you decide you want to start tracking exercise. Well, exercise is a very broad category and can include activities like gardening to training for ultra-marathons. In this example you would be better served to track a specific type or method of exercise. For instance, you could use apps like RunKeeper to track your running or cycling, or you could use a pedometer to track your steps. The great thing about making a goal specific is that it allows you to find the right tool for the job. While you would be hard pressed to find one tool that tracks exercise, you can easily find a method for tracking your strength training activities or your swim laps.

M is for Measurable. You would think this would be a no-brainer, but it happens to the best of us – we forget that what we want to track has to be, well, trackable! Quantified Self is all about using the power of data to help you learn about yourself. When you decide to start along the path of self tracking it is vital to make sure that what you have decided to track can be measured in some way. In future posts we’ll talk about objective and subjective data collection, but for the sake of brevity let’s assume that you decide to use a tool or method that assigns numerical values to your behavior. Great! But, that is only the first part of making it measurable. You also have to take a step back and take a look at the data output(s) and decide if they make sense to you. For example, Gary likes simple 3-point scales to rate his feelings – good, bad, and okay make sense to him. Make sure that your measurement make sense TO YOU, because in the end YOU are what matters in this adventure.

A is for Attainable. Making your self-tracking attainable is a concept that is related to our previous QS 101 post on Keeping it Simple. So let’s assume you have the specific behavior down and you’ve decided how to measure it in a away so that it makes sense to you. It is now time to take a look at what it would mean to you and your daily routine to implement the tools/methods and data collection necessary to engage in your self-tracking plan. Simply put, is this something you incorporate into your life given all of other personal and social commitments. I, for instance, would love to track all of my writing for 2012 (email, twitter, research papers, etc.), but at this point the effort to engage in that task would take enough time that it would take away from more productive and enjoyable endeavors.** Making sure that your self-tracking practice is actually attainable is a good way to ensure that it remains enjoyable as well as informative.

R is for Relevant. The main focus of a self-tracking practice is to generate self-knowledge (look at our header it’s right under our logo). Knowledge generation for the sake of knowledge generation, while interesting, pales in comparison to knowledge generation that benefits you. You want to make sure that when you decide to engage in self-tracking that the insights you are looking for are helping you become your better self. For instance, I could track the number of times I open and shut my refrigerator and freezer doors. While this might give me some insight into what kind and type of food I consume (fresh vs. frozen) that data is probably less relevant to learning how to be my better self than tracking the types of food I consume by using a food diary or food image capture.

T is for Time-bound. This is probably one of the most overlooked and misunderstood aspects of self-tracking. By making your practice time-bound you are not necessarily stating when you start and stop your tracking-practice for a particular behavior of interest. Rather, you can use the idea of time-bounding to set parameters for when it is appropriate to delve into the data and go through the process of analysis and reflection. Setting this time parameter is very specific to you as a individual and the behavior you’re tracking. You may, for example, only need a week’s worth of food diary data to start to make some conclusions about how your diet is affecting your mood. On the other hand you may need to track your anxiety levels for a month to really understand how they correlate with your boss’s travel patterns. The actual time you decide to start the process of analysis and reflection isn’t important because you can always continue tracking after your first, second, . . . nth pass. What is important, is that you decide a priori (before the fact) when you will do it and then stick to that plan.

So there you go. Now that you know all about SMART you can starting using it to “optimize” your self-tracking practice. To get you started with conceptualizing your current or new self-tracking practice within the SMART framework I’ve created a simple worksheet you can use. It is available here for download here or you can access the google doc here. As always, feel free to post questions in the comments!

*This is only one concept for helping you think about self-tracking. We’ll be highlighting other methods and processes in the near future!

**I prefer calling my self-tracking a practice because it is an ever evolving process of doing, learning and refining.

***If you know of a way that I can accomplish this tracking task, capturing everything I write, in a simple and non-time consuming manner please let me know. You can email me here.

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Gary Wolf on MetaQS and Meditation

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

QS founder Gary Wolf speaks at the Silicon Valley QS meetup group, giving a meta look at what Quantified Self is about, followed by a personal show&tell about his meditation data.

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What We Are Reading

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Happy weekend, everyone! Here’s a smattering of inspiring things we’ve been reading at QS Labs this week:

  • Seth Roberts’ series of posts on Vitamin D3 and sleep. The lesson: what time you take your supplements could matter a lot.
  • Transforming behavior change from the Social Brain Project at the RSA (UK): Some really interesting insights into behavior change and the role of neuroscience and reflexivity.
  • The latest issue of Bruce Schneier’s always interesting Crypto-Gram newsletter, with fascinating accounts of data breaches and hacking attacks, personal data vulnerabilities, and – for a bonus – an intelligent call to get rid of the United States’s Department of Homeland Security.
  • Schedule your creative tasks for when you’re most tired – a thought-provoking look at a circadian effect on creativity.
  • An opinion piece on the Research Works Act, the piece of legislation that threatens to roll back public access to federally funded research.
  • Smart Geotextiles for ground and building monitoring (from our friend David Pescovitz at BoingBoing.)
  • Transistors developed to monitor molecular processes - listening to enzymes. QS is moving to the molecular level!
  • Psychotropic Medications Affecting Biological Rhythms. (PDF) Looking at mood disorders and medications in the context of circadian rhythms as well as shorter and longer cycles will play an increasing role in good medical practice. This has applications to other health issues as well, and will require increasing self-awareness of empowered patients.
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Welcome Ernesto Ramirez!

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Anyone who has presented their work at a Quantified Self conference will already know the amazing Ernesto Ramirez. Ernesto is a doctoral student at UC San Diego’s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, a leader of the San Diego QS Show&Tell meetup group, a regular blogger here, and a positive force inspiring people to live healthy lives. We are excited to announce that Ernesto has agreed to join us at QS Labs to share his goodness.

As our new Community Organizer, Ernesto will be helping to support new and existing QS Show&Tell meetups around the world, exploring social media channels to engage and cross-pollinate the global QS community, writing a “QS 101″ series to guide people new to self-tracking, and generally helping to keep our collaborative, listening culture strong.

You can expect to see and hear more from Ernesto in the coming months. He is also @e_ramirez on Twitter and Ernesto Ramirez on Google+.

Welcome, Ernesto!

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Numbers from Around the Web: Round 2

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Ernesto Ramirez

When we talk about Quantified Self and the meaning behind tracking there is always an underlying current that the numbers rule all. That there is a fundamental truth that is available and discoverable. But, in some cases self-tracking can take on different forms. For this week’s NFATW post I wanted to two projects that forsake the emphasis on numerical tracking for something different – visual tracking.

Hugo Campos
Hugo is a shining example of the e-patient movement (which I learned recently stands for empowered patient not electronic). His experience as the proud owner of an implanted cardiac defibrillator has led him to become an advocate for patient-centered data ownership and improved access to data derived from therapeutic medical devices. He’s also a big fan of Quantified Self and on more than one occasion has inspired me to be more active by engaging in fun FitBit step challenges. For the month of December, Hugo decided he was going to try and eat a vegan diet for the entire month, and document everything he ate by photographing his food. What followed was an amazing visual record of his dietary patterns. Take a look! You can click the images for the full Flickr set.
Flickr set Flickr set 1

I figure if it’s not worth photographing and sharing, it’s not worth eating. – Hugo Campos

Jeff Harris
Jeff Harris a photographer and 13 years ago he decided to begin an epic quest to document his life by taking on self portait every day. What follows is an amazing story of why he began this journey and the insights into his life that he’s learned along the way. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I will say that is well worth the six minutes to watch the video below.

We got such great feedback on the orignal NFATW post that we decided to turn it into a regular feature. Every few weeks be on the lookout for new posts profiling interesting individuals and their data. If you have an interesting story or link to share leave a comment or contact the author here.

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