Diabetes, Databetes & Marathon Training

A mobile biofeedback self-experiment- stress and eating

My name is Georgios Papastefanou. I’m from Germany and a social scientist and a social phycologist. In my research and my job dealing with the quality of life. The background is similar to that what Ullrich today told you, so I don’t want to tell you this once more. Actually I like this show and tell, so this is not a scientific conference; it’s a personal conference and I just want to give you what I show, namely this device. It is a wristband and this wristband is a sensor and it has a sensor for skin conductivity, skin temperature. It has an ultra-electric sensor to get the heart activity and tri-acceleration for movement and has the ambient temperature around the body, plus a key pad with buttons and you can chose the sampling rate you like up to 100 to 250 Hertz.

So with this you have got a lot of data on your sympathetic or parasympathetic nerve arousal, and app is indicators for your nervous activity. And you can use this for identifying specific emotional reactions like stress or like well-being and so on.

But this is not the case of the talk. We developed this device over the last several years, and now we want to introduce it to the community, to the market, and actually to the scientists in research for using this in field research.

Today I just wanted to show you and tell you my experience with this wristband.

I started last week wearing this for 24 hours, and adding this keypad with some buttons, by which I wanted to mark some activities which might be interesting for my question. And my main question which is not the main issue, but it is the one issue with losing weight. And the core of losing weight is being hungry and following a hungry impulse. So I had one of those buttons marked I’m feeling hungry. So I marked this and streamed this in the moments I felt hungry. And some others were appetite, and the place and I try to get a lot of contextual information, but actually the most important button was this hungry button. Why?

After one day and I started this last week, and I remembered that I had a smart phone with a camera. So I started to photograph my food and every part of my food I took a photo. And this was interesting also because it gave me some quantitative information on my food behaviour. So this is what I did, and this is what I got of my food behaviour for the last week and every day. You see lots of color, a lot of apples. I counted them and I ate five apples a day, so this was nice information but not very important. I knew that I ate a lot of apples.

It is a kind of Stone Age diet, namely the Stone Age means you eat fruit and vegetables what is available. Sometimes you are lucky and you find an animal and you eat meat one time a week maybe.

The thing I wanted to tell you is the following in what did I learned from this, two important points. One is a kind of retrospective experience, so first with the respondent was okay and I got used to, but the very important thing was the hungry button. So every time I felt hungry I pressed the button, and this was a time of battle. So this was the really important experience in not the data when I got this hungry feeling, but dealing with it. And this is an interesting psychological phenomenon, because this then made you yourself an object. And by this you get more control on yourself and this is a very fascinating topic.

The actual data was like this, and that is a snapshot. And the y-axis is the time date and the resolution is 10 second intervals. So I measured 50 hertz – 50 times per second, and then I collapsed this into one aggregate core of every 10 seconds. I have two y-axis, one is the skin conductivity changes, and these schools correspond to the sympathetic arousal, and this is a school of nervous amplitude of activity. The right one and the red bars are the moment where I marked I am hungry. These are different sizes, and this means I marked it by pressing it several times or longer as in very hungry.

So that’s it, and now we can start to talk of analysis, and to find what is the connection with this. One question would be what is the interviewer from one hungry and to the next depending on what I did eat.

The most interesting question which I don’t have an and so today is is this related with arousal, with the stress of something or watching or experience something and for that we need much more detailed analysis. We have to control what kind of food and when I get something, what happens and which place I was staying and so on.

So this is possible, and we have all the data, and now we are working on algorithms to put them into some programme to introduce the final result and this is work in progress.

Thank you.