What's New in QS

I have been very interested in knowing more about what kind of ways people measure this stuff. So for the last two weeks I’ve been looking carefully taking a look at some of the new products coming out, and I know that a lot of you are already using things like, how many of you have the Zeo and Fitbit, and Withings.

I have been looking at one or two new projects coming out and I’m really interested in myself in making some kind of thing as best as I can. So I tried to put together just some of the things that I think which are coming down the pike, and these are things that are not necessarily built right now but are things I definitely want to get or are interested when they come out.

I believe similar to what Dave said when he began with his whole talk about Quantified Self, and basically there is a bunch of things going on here with mobile and social networking, and what I call maker, so lots of new devices and really cool things that are coming out and sensors becoming available. All of this stuff is coming together, and you might have seen the (unclear 01:27) article I think it was last week, there was a lot of detail about new things coming out. If you have not read the thing from (Binet cuslacker?) DC that just came out a couple of days ago, that’s also some real interesting summary of some of the new things that we are going to be expecting in the area of mobile health and tracking.

Just to quickly go through some of the things. If you have a Fitbit he is the new thing called Shine. This is John Sculley one of the cofounders of this company or at least he is one of the names behind it. And is similar to a Fitbit only is designed to be really really small and has an attractive industrial design.

Here’s another one, does anybody here have a Basis? I did talk to one guy who ordered one and got it, but I haven’t actually got one myself. The cool thing about this one is that this just came out a week or two ago. The cool thing about it is has an optical heart rate sensor. So this is something unlike the Fitbit you will actually be able to listen to your heart rate throughout the day and night without emulating. Something to do with special patches, so I think that’s pretty cool. Also it measures your skin temperature, perspiration and a couple of other things. I’m looking very forward to some of these devices coming out because it will allow you to track those of different things about yourself and see how they all correlate.

Here’s another one and it’s along the same lines and it’s called the Amigo. Again coming out in some time in April. The interesting thing here is that it comes in two parts so that you can put one on your shoe lace and one in your pocket and because it’s got those two parts you can measure more different degrees of movement on your body. So presuming you will be able to measure more interesting things that way.

Here’s another one that I want. It’s a company, and its offering pre-order on Indiegogo which is like a kick starter and it’s really nice that people are coming up with new kinds of types of this. This one measures EEG basically brainwaves. Looks very interesting and really cool to me. It’s from a group in Toronto that has been doing various demonstrations that you can manipulate things with your brain. Like you put this little thing on their and you go play a game or a video game or all you have to do is think and the ball goes up, and if you think the other way the ball goes down and that sort of stuff. They are putting this together in a sense which I’m looking forward to see later next year.

He is another cool one that I ran into. Apparently there is research that shows that all human beings have an intuitive knowledge of which way is North just like bats and lots of others. Apparently there is a way that you can train yourself to be able to tell which way North is better. And if you wear this over a period of a couple of weeks apparently, every time you face North it will a little bit and after a while you will get good at it in understanding which way is North.

Obviously everything now is coming into mobile apps and a couple I would like to point out is this one is from the inventors of some of the creators behind Twitter, it’s an app called Lift. There are similar apps like this and the thing that’s interesting with this one is that it seems to be taking off and there are a lot of people out there using it. So I noticed when I put in a couple of Michael’s I immediately found dozens of other people who are also tracking the same kind of thing which will be cool to be able to do. It reminds me a little bit like foursquare, where you check into a particular location, and here you are checking into a particular goal, it’s like a competitive sting which makes it a little bit more interesting.

Here’s another one I thought that was cool for the iPhone, and you may be familiar that there are some iPhone apps that like you measure your pulse rate but you have to hold it up to the light. But this one apparently it uses some type of technology that you can look at your face, so you can look at it at a distance and see someone’s pulse rate which I think is cool. I tried it and I felt it had some mixed results, but I thought the technology behind it is quite interesting.

Here’s another one that’s coming out in a month or two, it’s AliveCor heart monitor. This one is interesting because it’s FDA approved and it can measure basically like an ECG unit, an EKG, monitoring for your heart which should be pretty cool to be able to have that in the hands of a lot more people to measure heart rates.

Another one that’s been around for a little bit but kind of cool is a way to be able to look at your moles on your body, and they have a way to be able to detect whether there is anything unusual about this mole. Or if they see something they can mail it to a dermatologist locally. I thought that was also an interesting thing because the business model is interesting because obviously they are going to partner with local dermatologist.

Just quickly also going through some other new enabling technologies that are coming down that I saw. I’m interested in hardware devices. There’s a new thing coming out very soon called the Electric Imp, which it seems to be a lot more optimized towards local Wi-Fi or IO and be able to do things based on – were not going to watch this.

Here’s a company that made some integration between lots of different types of sensors this is more for medical applications, and some that work with the healthcare industry and the big buck type of hospitals. It looks interesting to me and you will be able to see more things like this.

If you have a Withing’s scale or any type of device and you’re not using this new thing called If This Then That website, I would highly recommend it. It’s very cool and it lets you integrate some of the things that you seen. Like if you have a Withing’s scale it will let you automatically send an email to your mother if your weight gets below such and such.

Here’s my last slide just showing other cool up and coming products and I didn’t go into detail about these things and there’s a couple of projects that might be interesting on is a $99 microbiome test. Send a little sample of your poop and they’ll come back with a analysis of your micro bio. I’m doing it.

And there is another company coming out with a very very low cost blood test and things you might want to measure like your vitamin A level in your blood or cholesterol and all those sorts of things. it’s a very low cost test and again these are Indiegogo projects so far looks very cool.

There are other people coming out with things like a self-scope thing which is designed to be both of these things are eye care. So a lot of things that you can do like last week I had an eye appointment now you will be able to do that stuff in the privacy of your own home. And I can definitely see this sort of thing taking off over time. So I’ve been putting a lot of my discoveries on this website here. So if you feel like tracking this more I’m going to be tracking this myself. So please definitely do.

Thank you.