Tag Archives: sleep

How to Download Your Zeo Data

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

ZeoData
If you’re a loyal, or even infrequent user of the Zeo sleep tracking device then you’ve probably heard the sad news that the company has shut down. This opens up a lot of questions about what is means to make consumer devices in this day and age, but rather than focus on those issues we’ld like to talk a bit about data.

Zeo has been unfortunately a little quiet on the communication front and there are quite a few users out there who are wondering about what will happen to all those restless nights and sound sleeps that were captured by their device. This has been compounded by the fact that the Zeo website went down for a short time (it is up as of this writing) closing off access to user accounts and the data therein. Lucky for you there have been quite a few enterprising and enthusiastic individuals who have taken the time to create or highlight ways to capture and store your Zeo data.

Use The Zeo Website
You can’t fault Zeo with making it hard to access your own data. As long as their website is up you can easily download your sleep data from by logging into your user account at mysleep.myzeo.com. After logging into your account you will see a link on the right hand side labeled “Export Data.” Click that link and you’ll be able to download a CSV file containing all your sleep data. They’ve even provided a description of the data and formats that you can download here.

Eric Blue’s FreeMyZeo Data Exporter
QS Los Angeles Meetup Organizer and hacker extraordinaire whipped up a simple data export tool using the Zeo API. The great thing about Eric’s is that even if the myZeo web portal goes down this tool should continue to work.

Download Data Directly From the Device
If you’re using a Zeo bedside device then you can continue to use it and download the data  directly from the memory card without relying on uploading it to the Zeo website. In order to do this you’ll have to read the documentation and use the Data Decoder Library. These files are hard to find as they’ve been removed from the Zeo developer website, but you can access them from our Forum thanks to our friend Dan Dascalesu.  Zeo also created a viewer using this library that you can use via this Sourceforge page.

If you’ve found another way to download Zeo data please let us know. You can also participate in the great forum discussion that inspired this post.

Posted in Discussions, Tool Roundups | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

European Conference Preview: Breakout Sessions

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

ConferencePreview

At its core, Quantified Self is a community-driven effort to extract personal meaning from personal data. Our conferences reflect that by providing opportunities to learn what others are doing in their Quantified Self practice. Through our Show & Tell presentations you get to see first-hand accounts of how data is being collected and put to use in order to understand and investigate personal phenomena, but that’s not all our conference have to offer. In the spirit of collaborative learning we also schedule “Breakout Sessions” alongside our wonderful Show & Tell talks. These sessions, like all our conference programming, are developed and and facilitated by our wonderful attendees. Here’s a preview of just a few of the many fantastic Breakouts we have scheduled.

Title: The Self in Data
Breakout Leader: Sara Watson
Description: In my research on the QS community, I’ve found that we talk a lot about our technical requirements of data, and about how we want to use data. What we don’t often talk about is what it means to know ourselves through data. This breakout is an opportunity to discuss what data tells us about ourselves and how we relate to our data.

Title: On Sleep Tracking
Breakout Leader: Christel De Maeyer
Description: Does self-monitoring with devices like myZeo, Body Media create enough awareness and persuasion to change behavior and to maintain new habits? We would like to use this session to learn and share our experiences.

Title: Tracking breathing as a Unifying Experience
Breakout Leader: Danielle Roberts
Description: During this session we can exchange experiences on the tracking of respiration and tracking and visualising of life group data in general. You’ll have the opportunity to take part in a demo using custom breath tracking wearables and real time visualisation of breath data.

Title: Activity trackers
Breakout Leader: Michael Kazarnowicz
Description: We’ll take a look at the most common activity trackers on the market today. We will look at the trackers (maybe even play around with them hands-on) and compare the functions and the data you can get from them.

Title: QS as a Catalyst for Learning?
Breakout Leader: Hans de Zwart
Description: In this session we will explore whether quantifying yourself can act as a catalyst for learning. Can it speed up the learning process? Can it help us in achieving the holy grail of learning, a personalized tutor? What perverse effects might it have in the context of learning?

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. We hope to see you there!

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Ari Berwaldt on Sleep, Cognition and Fasting

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

Ari Berwaldt wanted to better understand how his sleep affected his mental performance. In this great talk Ari explains his insights from tracking his cognitive skills using Quantified Mind and some surprising results about the lack of correlation between his Zeo data and his mental performance. Make sure to keep watching as Ari also explains some very interesting data and conclusions from blood glucose and ketone tracking during fasting. Filmed at the QS Silicon Valley meetup group.

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Jules Goldberg on Quantified Snoring

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Jules Goldberg is a snorer, and estimates that he has spent 1/8th of his life snoring. The noise was bothering his wife, so he built an app called SnoreLab to quantify his snoring (mild, loud, or epic?) and help him reduce it. In the video below, Jules shares how he identified where his snoring was coming from, remedies he tried, and which ones made it better and worse. (Filmed by the London QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

SnoreLab from Ken Snyder on Vimeo.

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Leigh Honeywell on Solving Her Sleep

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Leigh Honeywell has always had trouble getting herself to go to bed, so she started tracking her sleep to make sure she was getting enough rest. In the video below, filmed at Quantified Self Seattle, Leigh talks about the different ways she measured sleep, how she caught up on her sleep debt, and what she learned about her anxiety and crashing.

Leigh Honeywell from David Reeves on Vimeo.

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Quick and Reliable Mood Measurement

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Gary Wolf

Sami Inkinen, triathalete, self-quantifier, and founder of Trulia, measures his mood on a five point scale every morning, within five minutes of waking up. This method fascinates me. I do something similar (though I use only a three point scale). Sami has found that this quick and easy measurement reliably correlates with his athletic performance, suggesting that it indeed measures something significant about his overall well being in the day ahead.

Read Sami’s full post here: What the first 2 minutes after waking up can tell you about the day ahead?

Posted in Personal Informatics, Personal Projects | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Numbers From Around the Web: Round 11

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Ernesto Ramirez

I’m typing this post while flying back to Southern California after spending a few days at a “Big Data” conference in San Francisco. One of the best things about the conference was meeting the subject of today’s round of Numbers From Around the Web. I first stumbled upon Bastian because he’s the main instigator and developer behind a great project called openSNP. Simply put, openSNP is a place you can host your direct-to-consumer genomic data for the world to see, understand, play with, download, well you get the point. This is a really interesting phenomenon that deserves it’s own post, but we’re going to explore some really neat QS experimentation and learning Bastian engaged in to better understand his sleep.

Bastian, On Sleep

So, I found out about Bastian because openSNP announced that they also built a method to link and host Fitbit data (you can do that here if you’re so inclined). Turns out Bastian is an avid Fitbit user and has been using it to explore his sleeping patterns. His  first major insight from his data indicated that in about 5.5 years he should be sleeping 24hrs per day:

So I downloaded my data from openSNPand started playing around with it: I did a simple linear regression over the time series and could indeed find a trend towards more sleep. The regression came out as y = 0.5x + 417, which ± says that for each two days that pass I will sleep a minute longer, which also means that it will be about 2000 days (or 5.5 years) until I will sleep 24 hours a day.

So yes, obviously regression may not be the best tool in the statistical toolbox to understand sleep so he decided to examine another question: “Do I sleep better or worse when there is someone in bed with me?” Using his sleep and calendar data he was able to identify nights he spend alone and nights he slept next to a warm body and found some pretty interesting stuff.

Sleeping alone vs. sleeping with a companion

You can clearly see here in his table of 80 days of sleep (60 alone vs 20 with a companion) that he actually tends to sleep worse when he is sharing his bed. While he spends more time in bed, he takes longer to fall asleep, spends more time awake, and is awakened more often. For those of you who are not statically inclined those p-values indicate the probability that the difference in the two categories is due to chance (you can learn more about p-values here).

Like many good scientists he dug deeper to make sure what he was observing wasn’t related to other confounding variables such as the day of week:

weekdays vs. weekend days

Bastian didn’t find any significant differences in sleep quality between weekend and week days for his sleeping situation, but as one might expect he’s less active and sleeps more on weekends.

So, while this analysis might seem simplistic, one of the great things about Bastian and what he’s developing at openSNP is his willingness to be open with his data. Do you have some ideas about what you might find about Bastian from his Fitbit data? Have another hypothesis about sleep? Well you can test it out by downloading his data! You can start by reading his excellent post about this sleep analysis here.

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. 

Posted in Numbers from Around the Web | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

An Experiment with Polyphasic Sleep by Emi Gal

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Gary Wolf

A great talk on a Polyphasic Sleep experiment by Emi Gal, the CEO of the interactive advertising platform Brainient.

“The main takeaway was that it is fun, but not sustainable. None of the polyphasic sleepers have succeeded in doing it more than six months. You always act tired…”

If you’ve experimented with polyphasic sleep, we’re interested in your stories.

Posted in Personal Projects | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Steve Fowkes on pH Tracking for Inflammation, Sleep, and Mental Performance

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Today’s breakout session preview for the upcoming QS conference comes from Steve Fowkes, a QS regular. Here is Steve describing his session “pH tracking for learning about inflammation, sleep, and mental performance:”

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I like to see QS people distill down self quantification to fundamental aspects of wellbeing.  Cognitive performance and sleep, for example, go to the core of self, the mind-brain aspect of wellness.  But beneath that is the cellular dynamic, the metabolism of the body’s and brain’s many cells, which oscillate on a 24-hour basis to create specialization of energy metabolism during the day and peak healing/sleeping at night.  This creates a tidal pH in tissue and in urine that can be tracked to verify that this basic biological rhythm is functioning and robust.  And if not, these data can be used to evaluate interventions intended to repair and restore this rhythm.

Inflammation is one way this rhythm is broken.  Purposefully.  Inflammation from infection is potentially catastrophic, so the body defers healing/sleeping processes (i.e., the “alkaline” circadian phase) in favor of energy production and immunity (i.e., “acidic” processes).  This is highly adaptive when the infection goes on for two days or a week, but maladaptive when the time course is months, years and decades.  The loss of alkaline metabolism, and the deferred repair/healing of body infrastructure, is devastating to the body, the brain and the mind when it accumulates over extended periods of time.  In our modern age, as we depart further and further from our “natural” roots, inflammation is becoming the endemic normality.

Inflammation from non-infectious processes causes these same effects.  But it is probably much more common.  Allergic foods (triggering IgA, IgM and IgG-mediated reactions) cause deferred healing of the intestine and colon, which leads to leaky-gut and irritable-bowel syndromes, and can develop into celiac and Crohn’s diseases.  Early symptoms include fatigue (which can become chronic fatigue syndrome), increased sensitivity to pain (which can become fibromyalgia), sleep disturbances (shallow sleep, difficulty in falling asleep or staying asleep, apnea, and not feeling rested in the morning), brain fog (particularly mid-day, 12-hours opposite your deepest sleep), increase of compulsive behaviors, increased obsessive ideation, increased emotional volatility and borderline depression.  Weight-gain, too.

Sequential urine pH testing is a pain-in-the-ass way to assess such aspects of wellbeing.  When used as a biofeedback device, it can change your health for the better.  So if you are sufficiently motivated to employ a lifestyle-invasive health technique (testing your urine pH every time you pee for 2-5 days at a time), come join the discussion.

Posted in Conference | Tagged , , , , , | 21 Comments

Sky Christopherson on The Quantified Athlete

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Sky Christopherson is a velodrome cyclist who has been on the U.S. Olympic team. After retiring, he lived in the world of startups, and when his health started to decline as a result of that stress, he turned back to the kind of quantification he had been doing as an athlete to restore his health. In the video below, Sky talks about what he learned, like how temperature affects his deep sleep and how his blood glucose fluctuates. He also shares the exciting news of setting a world record, at age 35, after his self-tracking experiment. (Filmed by the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

Sky Christopherson – Self Quantification and Performance from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.

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