Tracking Activity, Posture and Time for Increased Health and Productivity

Tracking Activity, Posture and Time for Increased Health and Productivity

Hi everybody, I’m Florian Schumacher. I’m something like a Quantified Self ambassador for Germany, so I co-organize the groups in Berlin and Munich and I help my fellow organizers in cities like Stuttgart or Hamburg. I’m working in the wearable technology industry and personally I’m a huge fan of everything that has an internet connection that’s collects data, so different activities and or a weather station that informs me when I should open a window because the air is getting bad.

I also have a blog, it’s igrowdigital.com and on that I do projects like comparing different pedometers, so I did a test with six different sensors, so you can see the step counts of these products here. It’s over eight days, and each column is like the number of steps from each of these devices, and as you can see they are quite in the same range. So in the next slide you can see that there is a trend for example. The yellow dot is always below the average line, so it’s different from the average, and the blue dot from the job on update always being above the average. So there’ like a clear trend.

And if you look at the data for me in eight days, average behavior some workout in the gym and some walking to the office or to the store, it was like a 26.8 variances between the values so I think that’s pretty good.

I’m also a big fan of self-reflection so I built a tool is a diary called Chromeo and yeah, I’m looking for people to support that and I will give an office hour about Chromeo later on.

So that’s a lot of projects I’m doing and if I look at my rescue time data from 2012 it was like seven and a half hours working at the computer each day from Sunday until Saturday and the IPhone and the IPad is not included and activity work was like two thirds of that, so if I’m looking at a video on YouTube or whatever, it’s not in that but two thirds of that were PowerPoint, blogposts, stuff like that. 500 hours were mail, 400 were social media and some more hours were on the blogpost. So lots of my 2,700 hours of computer work are communication.

So in order to remain healthy and more successful in 2013 I decided to come up with the program, this is tracking activities to just be active, and then I had some back pain from too many hours working at the computer so I got myself a standing desk and a posture sensor which to track my posture when sitting or standing. And I also started tracking my time and this helps me understanding what I’m doing which project I’m working on, and also doing my built for the freelancing project.

So next I want to share what I have learnt from this. So I’ve accused a lot of different pedometers, and I really like the ones that give me a straightforward feedback like the Nike Fuelband, and every evening I can see I’ve reached my goal and it’s like a party at the wrist going on. For me that’s much better than just getting the data into a silo and I have no feedback from that. Also, the Lumo Back is a sensor that fits in the back and it vibrates if you have a bad posture. So it not only remind you about your posture, you can also see on a smart phone application your real posture.

So for me it was typical to stand something like this that you see here, and then I realise you should be like this in the next picture. So, I really could use that with some from outside to correct my own feeling for my body and readjust my stance. So I really like that.

Then I’m tracking different projects and I’m working on sports and recreation, and I use my calendar to build in my blog and I met a few annotations in what did I do and time so I can get a list aggregated with a tool called Office Time, and it shows for example what I’ve done for my blog and I can see the total amount of time that I spend on that. So it’s based on calendar, and I have a calendar for each freelancing project for the blog for Quantified Self Management. And I can see how much of each of these projects are taking in my overall time, so it’s only goal related time. So here we can see how health is like 16%.

So, I’ve learned from measuring stents with different pedometers. I used the Fitbit which was measuring the amount of stairs that I was climbing, and in that case I did not take the elevator in my house; I live on the third floor. And when I use another device and that control mechanism wasn’t there any longer yeah, I didn’t avoid it so like if I don’t measure it I don’t do it.

And I have learned something about what I do and the posture for example, at least two days I spent at a conference in Stuttgart, it was the Of Man to the Human, and there were people talking about scientific ideas in how to augment the human experience in the future. Quite interesting, but the conference chairs weren’t as good as here. So just a few seconds and you can see my posture score for the day was the worst I ever had. So it was really hard for me to remain a good posture at the conference. And if I compare it to a day that I’m working at my home office at the standing desk, so that’s a day when I did different things for Quantified Self, and prepare some slides, I went to the gym and write some mail all things standing active I had my best posture score ever.

So this is really like a feedback loop and the standing desk is adjustable, so I can sit down and that’s how I start my day, but if I want to get a higher posture score I need to bring it up.

I’ve learned from tracking my time. So this is a great example and I used three blogs for writing a blog post, and I can get the total amount of time that it takes, and by making annotations I can see how long stuff actually takes. For example, I had been working for 60 minutes on something and then I write three mails and I get the feedback in the awareness saying it takes really long.

But also I can start a counter that tells me what I’m working on, and this builds a mental barrier against doing something else, because it is like counting time to something and committing myself to that.

So, I’ve learned about tracking my time and I only attract the things that I want to do. In the beginning I tracked everything like housework and shopping. But then I started just tracking my projects and the things that I do for health, because I want to increase those and I want to fill my whole calendar with these things that are important for me.

Okay, that’s all. There is some information on my blog igrowdigital.com, thanks.