Quantifying My Mental and Experiential State

So today I’ll be talking about quantifying the mental and experiential states. And so we’ll be talking about a personal project that I’ve been working on for decades now. And so Leonard Cohen died last week so that’s a bit of a tribute quote there.

My name is Tahl Milburn. I’m the creator of LIAM, which is a life automation system. Some of you might have seen it at QS15 presented. I’m also the CTO of a digital wellness startup. You can get a hold of me at biz@tahl.net

So LIAM has three dimensions, LifeChronical which is a chronology of my life. LifeState, which is the current state of my life, and LifeConsol which is planning and control, that includes home automation and many other tools.

So how do you measure LifeChronical? Why it’s 6860 days of life logging LifeState, I have a score of 92 I did on the 14th, it changes every 15 minutes and LifeConsol. Think of chronical as the past, lifeState is the present and then the future.

So I will touch on the LifeState, and it’s broken into three broad areas. Personal, functional, and interactional and I will break those down on the next slide into nine different pieces.

So this describes a life, physical, mental, spiritual , assets, vocation, interest, experiences, relationships and community. Each one can be measured, scored and you can get an overall score for your life, so that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

LIAM currently implements six of these nine areas, and two we will touch on today. The mental, how do you measure the mental and how do you measure experiences, so we’ll see that in the next few slides.

So if we normalize that into a graph on the very right, if you take each of those areas and then give it a score and then give it a weight, you add it all together and that gives you an overall life score, and so that’s where I come up with the number of 92.

Now why have a life score?

You know your state of life at a glance, when you see something major has changed its obvious from the number and it motivates you to improve. So it appears on my website and glancible devices and so forth.

So this is what it looks like at a resolution of three stacked column charts per day, there is a higher resolution, and we’re going to drill down to next is the mental and how that’s measured.

So if we look at the mind, the state of mind can be represented in what I know, what I think and what I feel. And so now I’m going to drill down in how we quantify in how we feel, and so if someone says, tall Harry how are you doing? I may say hey, the DOW hit 50,000 today and that may have a very high valence, and that’s the term used in psychology is valence, may be a plus two, or my toe hurts and it’s a minus one, or hey I’m good, how are you, that’s zero because that’s neutral.

So I capture my valence one or more times a day, and I do it either on my website, a mobile app, and IOT device etc. and by the way this is the basis of my company.

So this is what my mental state looks like over a period of 60 days. You can see with the diamonds I have words associated with particular states. You can see a moving average, which kind of smooths out the various things, and then we produce about seven graphs, which are basic statistics on the information we gather. Things like mean, the volatility, the trend, matched to standard distribution and so forth.

Each analytic is also scored, weighted and then totaled for an overall score, so my mental state can be reduced to a score, and then of course this can be adaptive depending on an individual.

Now that was touched on the mental, and now how do you measure the experiential, so let’s get to that next.

The experiential is basically comprised of where I have my experiences, how I spend my time, what I do, what is significant, and who participates. And those cover all five of the six interrogatives that we use in language. The only one that I don’t cover off is why of the interrogatives.

So if we look at location for example, this is where my location has been for over the last year by month. So my San Francisco home is blue, I spend way too much time at home because I work from home. I don’t see anything in yellow for office. Out local, and then out-of-town. And all of this is automatically captured, so authorization status of my home both vehicles have trackers in them. My cell phone has a track it in it. Any time I log into a website I have the IP address or the location, so then it can go in and tabulate this automatically.

It will also place on a graph where I have been, you can see the graph on the right side, and if it goes international we get a world map. And then how much time I’m spending, and spending way too much time at home which gets me to the next issue which is, how do you measure location.

Well you measure it against targets. Maybe I don’t have enough diversity in my travel. Maybe I’m not traveling enough. Maybe I’m at home too much. So I’ll be frank with you, I’ve been deemed on my travel.

This is how I spend my time. This is a typical day. It shows a percent of an hour spent by broad category of activity, and again it’s automatic. Here, office is not a location, but of office work, so how does LIAM know this?

Well if I’m asleep I bid it good night. How does he know I’m a recreating? Well, my DVD player comes on or game console. How does he know I’m doing office work? I send it to a work colleague email. So it then pays particular attention on a breakout on how much time I sleep. You see here, I’m spending 31% of my life, and that red slice there is where I’m supposed to be sleeping but I’m not doing good sleep. Anybody who has a Fitbit you know about this.

So we’ve covered off LifeState, and again this is broken into nine elements. We didn’t cover off LifeConsol or LifeChronical, and again LIAM is on his fourth generation, so this has been around for quite some time. And based on the feedback I got from the QS15 presentation, I actually started a company called lifestate.io and our product is called selfstate.io and this is for tracking the subjective. So you are welcome to try it at no cost. It is aimed at being a B2C product. We’re currently in a medical trial, with the largest pain management practice in the bay area, and we are looking to capture and communicate the subjective experience with people with chronic conditions starting with pain.

Eventually, we imagine that LIAM will be commercialized, and so hence the overall company is called LifeState, and we hope to commercialize more and more of LIAM as time goes by. So stay tuned. I’m always interested in talking to QSer’s. We’re interested in investors, healthcare providers, potential employers, please get a hold of me at biz@tahl.net