Quantifying Motivation with a Smart Shirt

And stress is actually a measurable quantifiable thing because it has an impact on you physically, and you can see here this is my average heart rate and you can see that in January this year, we decided we were going to launch in May which we did last week. Well you see that I got pretty stressed about that, and you know it’s kind of funny because we’re actually working on a health and fitness product, but by working on it a little bit too much to hard, you know, my own fitness certainly even a little bit of my own health was a little bit impacted by that.

So another example is a metric that we call OM fuel and this is basically our energy level through the day; it’s based on heart rate and it’s based on breathing. On top there you see a day from last year and in the bottom in the data you actually see a day again from January. So you see a pretty big difference there right, so how do you mitigate that?

So how are you able to keep up even under pressure and keep working basically? So lucky for us, lucky for me I guess after all this is a fitness product and we have to test it a lot. So actually all of us we go to the gym pretty much every day wearing our own product, using our own product, and using our own shirts.

And that’s actually my own gym workout. This is what it looks like. You see there is a little bit of cardio there in the beginning. So there’s high movement, high heart rate exercise and there’s some weight stuff. You see in the middle there there’s breathing alerts. This is basically when the shirt alerts me that I need to breathe deeper because I need to get more oxygen and I need to get fuel to my own muscles so I can push it harder.

And you know this is great, and it actually has helped me improve like my energy level, my sleep and everything else. But to be honest with you I don’t usually have naked pictures of myself there. But you know, to be honest with you I actually have a pretty short attention span. And doing my own routine even makes me have got a little bit boring for me pretty fast actually. So I started thinking can I improve that? how can I moderate myself to keep doing what’s good for me, and how can I do the same thing for others, for the people who’ll be using our product, using our shirts.

And so in came up with two things and this is the first one and we call that Push. This is basically the effort level that you exert on every set of every exercise that you make and that has a little secret sauce algorithm that translates that to actual points. So you get a point for every set. It may seem silly but it actually works really well because it sort of pushes you to do a little bit better on the next set and even more you thinking about this is how much I did for example in that test last week, and this week I want to get you know a few more points. You want to improve a little bit and that keeps you going.

And then you know the other thing that’s going to come up at the moment and the other metric that I look at is heartrate recovery. And heartrate recovery is actually a great fitness indicator. And the interesting thing about this is that it actually starts changing before you notice any changes in yourself.

So as you start working out, as you start exercising your hear will adapt faster than you realize. So if you are watching your scale, watching yourself in the mirror, before you see any differences there your heartrate will start adapting and your heartrate recovery after exercise will start improving, and you can see that this is seconds on the left, and you can see result of that.

This is actually not last week. This is the week previous when I did my presentation. And you see that you know, in general my heartrate is on average is lower, my energies better. I actually sleep better because I’m able to keep up my routine, and what allowed me to do that is I basically you know I tricked my own mind by showing it data that was not consciously aware of, by showing it my own progress. I was able to trick myself into continually to do that into keeping up my own routine. And so you know I’m not quite there yet, but it’s still an improvement from the guy that you saw on the second slide there.

And so I actually want to finish by a quote from Aldous Huxley, and he said the only corner of the universe that you can be sure of improving is yourself. And I’m going to add to that, the more you know about yourself, the better you can do it.

And so if you have any questions you can come and see me, like I said we have launched, we are shipping. You can find me a the table there, I’ll give you a discount.