QS Meetup Groups
Sponsored By
Friends of QS
Tag Archives: sms
Cedric Yau on The Well+Tuned Life
Cedric Yau trains in kung fu 12 hours a week. He wanted to track his his activity and energy levels, so he created a text-messaging service called Well+Tuner, where he also records notes for how he feels on different days. He learned how to time his food intake and 50 daily supplements for maximum energy, correlated his dating success with his mood, and discovered which exercises were most helpful for healing from an injury. A great self-experimentation story! (Filmed at the June 2011 New York Show&Tell meetup)
Cedric Yau 6-2011 from Steven Dean on Vimeo.
Tim van den Dool on Assisted Daily Living
Tim van den Dool takes care of his older parents, and has created a system to help caregivers like himself. His ongoing project is called Livind, for Assisted Daily Living. The system monitors elderly people in a non-invasive way to watch for accidents or other irregular things. If something happens, caregivers are remotely notified trough SMS or a beeper. (Filmed at the Quantified Self Show&Tell meetup in Amsterdam.)
Tim van den Dool – Assisted Daily Living (Livind) from Quantified Self Amsterdam on Vimeo.
Health Hashtags: A Microsyntax for People and Machines
With the explosion of microblogging, tweeting, and status updates, it is clear that embedding personal metrics in social tools is on the tips of our fingers and is a natural extension to the personal toolbox. This post explores the opportunity of OHME (Open Mobile Health Exchange), a first-mover in the new world of Microsyntax, and a new entry into the microsyntax.org working group.
How it works
Taking Twitter as the backdrop, and the #hash being the first example, Microsyntax might be termed ‘in-line metadata’. It is a self enclosed tag that associates this post with other like tagged posts. It helps search, and it helps set context and find-ability.
The first version of OHME adds more meaning to a set of personal metrics, including blood pressure, weight, steps per day, pain, and about 20 metrics a person can log using SMS, Twitter, devices, or nearly any tool that sends messages. The project offers royalty free libraries for schemas and parsers.
Where it fits in today (person to machine)
When micro-blogging, or posting personal status, hashes can be used to help systems (machine readable) tools use these tags and syntax to facilitate actions. For example, posting #spd=13045 suggests that a person has walked the equivalent of 13,045 steps in this day.
With microsyntax there is a new dialog on how to aggregate device manufacturers, software vendors, and users to grow a vocabulary that thrives and rewards them with good tools and increased connection to their community.
Where it leads in future (machine to machine)
The advent of microsyntax, and OHME provides a new rhythm to the stream. Mashups made from diverse streams of personal data allow new contexts to emerge, and new possibilities for action and specialization. How will the health care system respond? Will it become more patient centric, or merely use data generated automatically by various devices to make us more “hospital ready?” Microsyntax such as the OHME project highlight the opportunity for every person to have quality streams of personal metrics. Health loggers are already using microsyntax today. Now is the time to build tools that aggregate and share these streams in meaningful ways.
Some considerations (machine to person is person to person)
In observing the landscape, it looks promising that natural alliances can form around syntax and vocabularies, giving rise to tools that support each other’s streams and have graceful hand-off from system to system. In this new world model of data stewardship, a future can be seen where the microsyntax stream becomes more a critical resource. It is in this context that enterprise class systems may emerge to help guide microsyntax systems towards reliable services.
Today, our social web may be a bit fragile for such un-fettered live results about personal metrics. A community designed sandbox for moving services gradually into the consciousness and letting first-adopters set the terms is a promise for microsyntax.
Even though it is easy to type #911 #Robbery, our social and operational systems may not be as easy to accept the consequences of the message until we set rules and contexts of reliability – and the sender is authenticated in a way that grows
trust.
trust.
In this arena, microsyntax has both the honor of being extremely easy for the user (can do it without a mouse or selection) and to locate (parsers and search ala Twitter). It also on the cutting edge of personal utility and personal safety and asks the question of how do we communicate personal streams.
Speaking for one logger, this is a great step forward, the start of an the ecosystem that supports people and patients everywhere. #OM+1!
Disclosure: Mike Kirkwood‘s first post on Quantified Self, he is CEO of Polka a personal health platform. 
Self-Tracking Through SMS
Just a quick follow up to the last post about Tweet What You Eat, inspired again by Flowing Data and by a telling anecdote from a recent health conference, where I concluded that ubiquitous self-tracking is coming, but perhaps not from the direction expected by many health professionals.
At the conference I met the CEO of health informatics company who had a seemingly clever idea about how to collect patient data, track compliance with medical recommendations (prescriptions, glucose monitoring, etc.), and provide reminders to patients and reports to their doctors. His name is Kent Dicks, and the company is called MedApps. Dicks is smart and well informed, and is working hard to make ubiquitous tracking work.
MedApps uses early generation wireless, where the connectivity costs are cheap and the bandwidth meager. The business idea was the create a general device, basically a wireless transmitter, that would transfer data over the cellular networks, and then arm this devices with a bunch of different customized dongles to connect to all different types of measurement tools: scale, glucose monitor, pedometer, cardiac monitor, etc. Owning a general, proprietary solution to an admittedly messy problem justifies a multi-hundred dollar price tag. After all, this is meant to be a medical system, approved by the FDA and paid for by the great mother of health care business plans: insurance reimbursements. Patients would comply with self-tracking because they wanted to cooperate with the regimen given to them by their doctors. If added motivation was needed, they could be influenced by insurance discounts, or even paycheck bonuses or penalties in the context of corporate “wellness” programs.
I long for a general solution to the data collection problem, but this approach strikes me as somewhat wrong headed. It is serving the labyrinthine business system, rather than the more straightforward and obvious needs of people. (People who are not necessarily “patients.”) Meanwhile, companies like Zume Life are just having people read their data into a digital recorder and transcribing the reports, skilled users like Nathan Yau are writing Twitter bots, and small scale entrepreneurs like Alex Rossi are creating Web based services like Tweet What You Eat that collect reports via SMS. Data is beginning to flow through and around the highly disorganized and loosely connected networks that already exist, and as this flow increases I wonder if the more fully engineered and FDA approved systems will simply become irrelevant. And the bigger theme is also relevant. Either self-tracking will be understood as a good thing, and many people will want to do it, or it will not be so understood, and all the inducements in the world will probably not be enough to motivate them.
To get a sense of how low the threshold is for programmers to build a
simple system to gather personal data, take a look at Nathan’s recent
post on Flowing Data about how to make your own Twitter bot. Also read
the comments. When I did, I thought: “Pioneering users can make popular programs… This problem is on the way to being solved… ”