Honestly, the only reason I use Foursquare and various other personal tracking things is I hope someday to be able to export the data into a nice visualization like this.
Meh, at least I know exactly what I'm sharing, versus most people who have no idea a variety of corporations and three-letter agencies could get basically the same information from their cell phone, toll road transponders, license plate readers, credit card transactions, etc, etc, etc.
just so you know, all the information that's stolen from people without their knowledge, also happens to you, so the sense of knowing exactly what you share is honestly just an illusion.
I would do almost anything to have this data for the past few years.
What I really like about Moves is how comprehensive it is — it has every single place you went to rather than just ones that you thought were worth checking into, etc. What turns out to be relevant or helpful data to have is hard to know except in hindsight.
I am a data junkie as you are, and I have several years of Foursquare data now, but just recently started using Moves. One gripe I've had is that if I stop somewhere for less than a two to three minutes, Moves doesn't register that I was actually at a location, and there's no way to force it to do so. Have you experienced something similar? Beautiful site, by the way.
Clicked around a little and didn't see how old he is. Personally, I could run a mile under 5 minutes in high school, ran track for high school and college, wore out my knee so it hurts constantly at any more running for years after, and currently I'd be happy to get any time at all nowadays. So 10 minutes could be quite good considering his life situation.
With rovers shooting lasers on Mars I'm disappointed that ligament and joint repair isn't as routine as dental work. Actually, I'm also disappointed that I still have to brush my teeth. The technology trickle down doesn't really jump out at you, does it? Imagine a country redirecting a year of military spending to advance the smaller everyday things.
In all his clumsiness, chatmasta is exposing the core topic of the website: What happens when one publishes his private data to the world? Criticism, mockery, or respect if you're lucky to have the right crowd. I'm looking forward to seeing someone stalked using data he published voluntarily, just for the social experiment. Will it be good? bad?
Some guy already tried this. He looked up instagram users in his vicinity, looked up their most recent photos, then found them and freaked them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P_0s1TYpJU
Check out Felton's other site - daytum.com. It's an app and website that helps people get started, though the fancy visualizations aren't modularized just yet.
Jquery + d3. Surprisingly it works quite well on my old Ipad 1 (graceful degradation for the animations). Javascript heavy websites usually crash safari
Nice PR campaign to prepare the floor for a new generation of wearables / tracking & monitoring devices .. don't get me wrong, I like(LOVE) the technology, I just don't like the idea of becoming a self-sponsored spy pawn on me and everyone around .. focus on privacy, local/self hosted services first, hardened leak-free hw, cloud data encryption(with keys not leaving your devices) by default + 1000 of other privacy-related challenges that are being largely ignored .. and since this is not in the fin. interest of hw manuf./main sw houses .. the world is becoming a modern, more efficient, better organised version of orwel's 1984 and it looks like regardless of the amount of information confirming this disturbing development, people naively trade 15min of fame for privacy again and again(and it - will - turn against you even if you are protesting in front of the "right" embassy - well, activism of any kind is considered a threat these days so better stick to those kitty pictures and comments about the newest season of <insert your favorite tv-series> )
What I am wondering, though is: how are the vitamin/mineral stats on http://aprilzero.com/sport/ generated? Is there a way to self-measure these stats without blood tests?
There's no way that I know of besides blood tests. It's a bit painful but not too expensive and in my opinion well worth it.
The blood levels are coming from a standard blood test, available at any doctor's office. I've been getting them about once a month.
You need to fast for at least 8 hours prior to get accurate results, and it takes about 2 vials of blood. I'm waiting for some sort of device to give you realtime values with just a prick of blood or constant monitoring.
Beautiful website indeed; there are a lot of carefully crafted details, especially for navigation.
I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day.
I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it, similarly I would see myself trying to improve my sleep patterns. But really, so far, people I've met use this as yet another distraction.
I have yet to meet anybody who has been leveraging the data they collect; most (all?) people I know eat healthy, exercise and sleep well do so without relying on devices. Now, once we're able to track real health related data continuously, we may be able to detect illness or problems as soon as they arise and effectively create a feedback lookp. But from where I stand, as of today, these things are just gimmicks.
I'll give you one small example. I started using a sleep tracking app on my iPhone because I have bad onset insomnia and don't sleep well. After one weeks use I noticed that the nights I went for a short 20 min walk before bed I had a much better sleep score. I also fell asleep faster.
Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinking it helped me fall asleep more quickly but using the app for a week I was able to prove that false. Obviously my data set it very small but the changes seem to be working.
If you collect data on lots of different things all of these small changes/improvements you make could add up to a noticeable difference in quality of life. The holy grail of course is software that can analyse all of these data points and recommend changes.
'Sleep Cycle'. Orange icon with a clock on it. I was always quite skeptical of it and didn't download it until recently. It's been one of the top apps for a few years and has good reviews. I've found it to be quite accurate. It recommends that you keep your iPhone connected to a charger and under your sheet as you sleep but I've found just placing the device next to my pillow works fine and only uses about 25-30% battery life per night.
IMHO, you don't need personalized data for this kind of stuff.
More seriously, there's plenty of literature out there about these things; spend 5 minutes on Google and you'll find all of these recommendations. You'll know that exercising will help you sleep. You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns. These are becoming common sense and shouldn't require you to run you own little experiment to figure it out.
If you want to improve the quality of your life, I doubt a fitbit will help you. You already know what you should be doing starting with the obvious ones:
- Exercise more,
- Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...),
In my opinion you are missing two very key points.
1) Saying "well, you could just find this information some other way" may be true but useless - everyone has different mechanisms that work well for them. If it takes a device or app or whatever for someone to stick with a change they want to make, then good for them.
2) While there is definitely some general health and fitness advice that would benefit most people, it's terribly naive to believe the story ends there. Population averages are just that, every person will also have specific mechanisms and effects that are important to their own wellbeing and not particularly generalizable.
1. It matters to me because I see this as a waste of resources (hardware, software, brains) for something that is near obvious. While it's anyone's choice to consume the way they want, I am just morally opposed to it.
2. What these apps address are general health/fitness metrics, in a very superficial manner. As I said, once we have more meaningful tracking I'll be onboard, for now these are rudimentary toys.
Not at all to disagree, but just to clarify: drink less alcohol, drink lots more water. Minor dehydration is amazingly common and you'll be astounded how much better you feel if you force yourself to drink large amounts of water regularly.
There is zero evidence supporting the idea that drinking water beyond thirst is helpful. If anything people tend to have slight electrolyte deficiency, which is exacerbated by fluid over-consumption.
You pretty much have to tell old people to drink, after they're too old to know they need to drink.
Its also "semi well known" that cold weather tends to mask thirst symptoms, and the resulting dehydration doesn't help much WRT hypothermia prevention, so this claim is, again, not people in general, but the subset of people in an environment colder than they're used to.
This is horrible advice. This is the type of advice which causes people to give up on what might be a modest improvement, because they rapidly find you can't get anything done when you have to get up to pee every 20 minutes.
I have got enormous value from tracking my resting heart rate and body temperature. Anything under 75 bpm or under 98F and I know I need to eat and sleep more and skip exercise. No need to log. I think a ton of folks would benefit.
Beyond those two metrics I can't think of anything it'd be useful to check regularly. Reflex time or achilles reflex test might be good.
Uhm? Why do you consider a resting heart rate of under 75bpm to be a bad condition?
I'm just assuming that you are within the average age group of hacker news readers (somewhere between 20 and 40 years) it's not really recommended for you to be above 75bpm.
Hypothyroidism. Anything much below 70 is indicative of suppressed metabolism. Up towards 90 is actually best. There are clear correlations between health, intelligence, and resting heart rate. The most intelligent people have resting heart rates up around 95 bpm.
The idea that a lower pulse rate is better comes from the observation that endurance athletes have low resting pulse rates, and it is generally assumed that endurance exercise is healthy. The truth is that high volume exercise suppresses the metabolism and compromises health.
Here's a counter-claim: "A normal resting heart rate for adults ranges from 60 to 100 beats a minute.
Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness. For example, a well-trained athlete might have a normal resting heart rate closer to 40 beats a minute."
I'm not a doctor but I don't think that is true for most people. One of the most fit people I know has a resting heart rate of 40-50. Mine is usually 60-70 when I'm calm - when it is 80 or more something is generally off and I need to exercise more.
The low pulse of athletes is adaptively suppressed metabolism. It is not a good thing. The body deliberately reduces resting energy expenditure as a conservation measure because it anticipates the extreme energy demands of training.
Sprinters and strength athletes do no get a suppressed heart rate. It's only endurance athletes and others who train high volume.
This is well understood by a lot of trainers. Low pulse and low body temperature in the morning is an easy way to measure over-training.
People need to get it through their heads that highly trained "fit" athletes are not very healthy, as a general rule. They tend to develop problems relatively young. Marathon running is worst of all, each marathon run showing a statistical reduction in life span.
- Exercise more,
- Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...),
- Sleep more,
- Drink less.
*/
And as an insomniac I was having trouble with 'sleep more'. People with worse insomnia than me have to go sleep clinics to work out how to improve their situation. Mine wasn't bad enough to warrant that but fortunately there was an app to allow me to do a little of my own research. Without it I wouldn't be able to tell the time it took me to fall asleep - as I would be asleep.
Most people don't have such a high degree of intuitiveness to themselves to know what behavioural variations make any difference.
Google does not interpolate those suggestions from your personal data, that's where the fitbit etc. apps shine.
- Having a glass of water
- Going for a short walk
- Having a glass of wine
- Watching a movie/tv show with your partner
- Telling a bedtime story to your kids
- Washing the dishes while thinking about your day
- Talking to your mum/dad/bro/sis
- listening to some calming music
- having a shower
How would you know what contributed to your good night sleep?
Having an app/tool tracking these for you and telling you that your best sleep is when you do A C and F not E or G is very valuable.
If you are smart enough to track and figure it out, then heck, I think you have too much free time or you are highly intuitive of yourself
You are right. From what I see apart from use for sports professionals or people for whom physical health matters too much ( livelihood ) they would make use of it the most.
But still gathering al this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later somebody will figure out how to use the data so well that it could ( algorithm / AI ) could determine what you should do today to reach a certain goal to stay healthy which you messed up a day before? For example, people who work out a lot and live on a diet, might some day indulge in something without really wanting to and all this data could tell how much ( theoretically ) will affect your health so what you should do today to make up for yesterday (?).
Think about this on much broader aspect, too much of something eventually is bad. Nobody is going to tell you forever to stop something until you stop, apps like this could gather data and at the end of a week/month/quarter could tell you your score and could rather calculate the risk of xxxx disease/illness which could happen because of your bad eating habits.
All this data could be synced with your medical file/with your doctor in order to keep tabs on your health and push personalised notifications of what and what not to do or just be cautious/warning.
I don't know if such thing really already exists or possible or even good but all this data could be tapped in and used much better way.
Oh and no clue why all this data should be social or public. IMO, it should be private and shared within family/concerned people.
In order to correlate with heath issues your going to need a standard to work from. Which makes collecting most of this info before 'fit-bit 12.0' or whatever somewhat pointless.
What exercise data can tell you is if your gaining or losing ground. So, if you do 10k in the same time but your heart rate is higher or lower that means something. But it's not going to correlate with a say a 1% increase of diabetes because we just don't run studies with that much detail yet.
The site seems to be showing that it has gathered a lot more than just eating and burning calories, safe to say such intensive data can be used to correlate with certain standard illnesses to be cautious.
Your data over a period of few months might make more sense to understand what ill-effects certain things have had on you. Think about 1 year's worth of your data being analysed to tell what certain things have had certain health related changes in you. Of course it still would take time to know how the changes you make will change things in you but based on your past data it could predict perhaps?
Do you really need an app to tell you you're not eating healthy? Nutrition and exercise aren't that hard; your body is able to let you know fairly easily when you're messing up, if not immediately at least over time. I have a very hard time believing that tracking your calories is going to significantly change your diet in the long term.
If you're overweight, you don't need to check on your smart-watch to know it. If you're drinking too much, you probably know about it already. And if you refuse to recognize it, I'm not sure numbers will help you. You don't need an AI to see that if you're 5 times a week at the pub for an average of 2 hours, you may have a problem.
There seems to be a strong belief that these things are hard to evaluate on your own, that the body is something mystical that can't seem to have any obvious logic. Yet we refuse to listen to the very basic, and reliable, signals our bodies broadcast.
Now if you're diabetic, or developing an illness, having a silent device continuously testing your blood would help. But we're far from it.
There is a lot of other data these apps collect other than just the calories you eat or burn. Of course almost everything is a approximation but better than zero data on anything.
Nobody gets overweight overnight. You might not end up being 'overweight' if you know your certain eating habit will end up being bad for you ( everybody has a different metabolism rate ) so you cannot say eating xxxxx causes your friend to gain weight so will it you gain weight if you eat it out of moderation. All the data being collected individually and studied/analysed over time for 'you' is what could change.
Everything you say is right and approximations have been working good for everyone till now, but there is never harm to move from approximations and assumptions to absolute certainty about a few things we can measure ( now ).
This data could help you know when is the right time to test your blood maybe?
Honest question; can you point me at these apps? The only stuff I've seen so far is either tracking external data (running, walking, activity, ...) or requires input (for calories for example). There are some dabbling with more interesting data (blood levels for example), but too inaccurate to be taken seriously for now.
I don't agree that approximation are better than zero data; people are already self-diagnosing a lot, without the understanding that numbers, averages and science in that field are not as accurate as we'd like it to be. It takes a physician to accurately guess what may be good/wrong with you (and I mean guess).
Ultimately, I feel there's enough big, obvious metrics you can derive from your body without strapping a fitbit on.
>...But still gathering all this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later....
Also, Physicians do not accurately take the data. They ultimately diagnose/analyse the data they get from tests/devices/you.
You should read my earlier replies keep in mind that nobody here said that the data could be used to STOP going to doctors, it would rather help us skip a few visits but ultimately of course if something tells you, you are going to be sick ( gadget or sixth sense ) you'll need to go to your medical practitioner. Doctors and hospitals can never be replaced.
Keeping yourself healthy is different from falling sick.
I have enjoyed lifting weights for years, but in October 2013, I took the plunge, bought a bench, some bars and some plates, and started seriously lifting.
When I started seriously lifting, I collected some bench marks. I collected my one rep max, six rep max and ten rep max in four different exercises. Then, I collected data on my pulse rate after doing a ten rep set in various exercises.
When I work out, I collect what exercises I performed, how many sets/reps, and what kinds of weight I lifted. And, I intended to check my benchmarks once a month, but in practice it has worked out to be closer to every six weeks.
Roughly nine months later and collecting that data has proven very beneficial. For example, with strength training it is too easy to get into a routine and then keep banging out that same routine every day. I always know what I did the last time I worked a muscle group, so I feel intense pressure from myself to either move a few more pounds, bang out another set, or add a few more reps to a set. And, I get to track how various lifestyle changes interact with strengh training.
For example, in December, I broke my right thumb cross country skiing and had to take some time off lifting. Weirdly, the time off actually increased my bench and shoulder presses because I was using my left (non-dominant) side significantly more often. Balancing my right and left sides made me significantly stronger.
Or, in May, the snow was gone so I started jogging again. Jogging improved some aspects of my lifting - for example, my heart rate after a set has dropped since I added in jogging. But, it has also hurt other aspects - for example, my gains in strength are actually slowing. Incidentally, monitoring my jogging showed me that my tendency to settle into a routine carries across into other forms of exercise. I realized that I was running the same route every single time in roughly the exact same amount of time. My body got used to a level of effort and then stopped getting better.
Just because the 'people you have met' use this as a distraction does not mean that everyone will. And, just because all the people you know eat well and exercise regularly, it doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people find that the simple act of tracking their performance keeps them motivated to continuously improve. Others have goals beyond 'be healthy' and need to monitor their progress if they have any hope of reaching their goals.
I would be neat to see your pre and post workout blood-pressure stats too, and how that has changed over time. I can personally tell that when I squat or deadlift near my max that my BP peaks. I'd like to know how quickly it falls off after, etc. I'm also curious to know if heavy-lifting has positive effects on circulatory system elasticity.
>"Incidentally, monitoring my jogging showed me that my tendency to settle into a routine carries across into other forms of exercise. I realized that I was running the same route every single time in roughly the exact same amount of time. My body got used to a level of effort and then stopped getting better."
This is the trifecta of slow—consistently low mileage, no hills and running at the same speed every workout.
It's nice to have metrics to measure your progress with an exercise routine (walking, running, strength training), weight loss effort (lbs lost, fat %), etc. Although there are always narcissists, I think many people just like quantifying their progress. Just like receiving grades to measure your understanding when you were in school, these metrics allow you to assess whether you are moving in the right direction, and if so, to feel a sense of accomplishment. Wanting to be fit and healthy does not equal narcissism.
I like it. My big beef with it so far is that it looks like most of this stuff is input manually by Anand. (The 1200+ commits suggests that it's manual and not automatic.) I'm not anal enough to spend that kinda time tracking things. I have a Fitbit, a scale that i step on every day, Strava to track my runs, etc, but those are all things you just put on (or push a button) and forget about.
Things like climbing (which I also do) don't have automatic trackers, and tracking food intake is just too cumbersome these days for me to even try and keep up with that.
If there were better ways to automate these things and better APIs available to pull these things in automatically, I'd totally build something like this. I just don't have the time, inclination, or the energy to manually add the climbs, the calories, every food item, and myriad other things into the system.
So I'll say this: it's beautiful and full of very, very cool info. I just wouldn't do it myself unless I could generate all of that data. A handful of commits to build the site, and then let it update itself automatically via APIs. Granted, this means my site would be a bit less interesting, since the most interesting things on here are things you can't automatically track... but I'm working on plenty of other interesting things, and this just doesn't rate high enough on my list to do.
For what it's worth, having worked with Anand, I don't think 1200+ commits suggests it's input manually (you can see on the about page a list of some of the APIs it's pulling data from), I think it more suggests that Anand likes to commit a lot when he's building something. And for good reason, it's been really cool to check out historical revisions and see how a design changed at every step.
Yes, I can read. :) I'm saying not enough of it is automated for my tastes. A nice chunk of that data is likely calculated from manual inputs (things like climbing and difficulty levels, etc).
The issue I've had is that while each service does have an API for pulling data in automatically, it's tedious connecting to all of them at once. I'm sure there are multiple startups out there working on a data platform for quantified self - Segment.io for my own data - and I'd love to see a framework like Anand's applied to that.
Food intake, water intake, caffeine intake, many forms of exercise, and even the work you do daily (depending on job) aren't easy to track. Jawbone UP have a nice caffeine app that is useful if you remember to use it. I've heard of water bottles which register the movement of a sip. I still haven't found a food tracker that works for me - MyFitnessPal is the universally acclaimed one but I loathe it. Taking photos of one's food is a simple enough proxy if you aren't interested in the overall nutritional composition but more the qualitative part (and you can actually outsource and - to a small extent - automate nutritional tagging from photos). But yes, we are a long way away from being able to let much of this data be tracked automatically.
I think the important part is to figure out what questions you want to ask, if you aren't dedicated to tracking for its own sake. Are you having trouble focusing in the afternoon? Do you want to figure out if your sleep is a factor? Track your sleep religiously and go from there.
This site is gorgeous. There is so much attention to detail. I don't quite understand the barely visible half curves right above the transport row for a particular explorer day.
I think the half curves just represent some form of travel. If you look at March 29th [1] there's a large curve for his 8 hour flight, and some small gray ones for walking to his gate
Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started.
It's also smart to record the data yourself instead of sharing it with a health tracking app. With due respect to those projects, I draw a line at sharing specific and private health information. I've arrived at this personal stance after weighing the benefits of information sharing against the risks of my data being leaked, mishandled or mined.
>> "Personal health recording systems like this one are most useful for reporting symptoms to health care providers. In the event of a flu or a running injury, I like being able to tell my doctor exactly when, where and how the problem started."
I agree but recently I read that doctors tend to completely discount this type of data provided by a patient as they can't verify it's accuracy (did the patient collect the data correctly) and it would be risky to base their diagnosis on it.
Even if that is the case I think it can be very useful for people with chronic conditions. They can find out ways to minimise their pain through this kind of tracking/trial and error which a doctor would never have the time to do.
There is an "about this site" link at the bottom, where he lists some of the third party services used.
In general he has a few global objects which seem to contain everything for each section; ajax requests, animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) etc. Most of it is done via jQuery.
One of my pet peeves is when people are so "in" the webkit world they don't bother to even list the unprefixed version. I too looked at it in Firefox, and things actually look a bit broken. My guess is adding the unprefixed version would probably fix the majority of the errors I see.
I won't go so far as to say stop using prefixes, but ALWAYS include the unprefixed version last in the CSS stack. It's so easy with Sass also.
This is an astonishingly beautiful website, and clearly shows the technical and design skill of Anand.
However, I'm genuinely not sure what the purpose of this dashboard is other than as a résumé piece. What questions does it answer? How is it better than doing specific investigations using R?
Seriously, how is this downvoted? It's a sincere question. I enjoyed looking at the site, and I loved the interface, but I didn't get any insight into the data. Can someone enlighten me?
So nobody feel that tracking everything you do every second and log it in real time and forever on a server is terribly frightening ?!!!!
In 2005 i predicted every one who ever logged on facebook would regret it one day and pay a huge price for it. This is more than real now. Still you don't stop, and now you're sending to "them" in realtime your heartbeats, your weight, what you yeat, etc.
Did you just forgot about LIFE ?
Is this the next American Way of life ?
So yout think totalitarism is Iran or Syria ?
Pouarrrk !!!
You guys are totally out of your minds.
Seriously.
"It's only frightening if it's not deliberate / you don't know it's happening."
Oh my god, how old are you all ?
Are you the next generation of this world ?
Don't you just understand you behave like products and not human !?
This is possibly the end of the world.
Pretty sure your comment was tongue in cheek, but as a parallel to the older generations and this guy - consider that an autobiography is the author voluntarily revealing details about their life to a potentially massive audience. This is the same sort of thing, but without the narrative. It's also a work of art.
Not to feed the trolls, but I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with my smartphone and the societal expectations of availability lately. Phones are effectively tracking devices.
Are you saying you don't carry a cellphone? How has that decision impacted your daily life?
You carry a cell phone right? Use it to communicate too? Use the internet extensively? Those are the best tracking devices in the world. Your heart rate, the fact you eat burritos and exercise is relatively minor compared to the ubiquitous cell phone usage of the past decade.
I do have a phone, i AM tracked, ans i DEPLORE IT, but i do keep things SAFE the range i can that mean i'm not using any app i use my phone to call people and receive call.
I don't have facebook or rubbish social network account where I expose my life.
Yes all my stuff is recorded by the NSA, i DEPLORE IT, so i'm careful of what i can say over the network, you don't seem to be.
I just can't understand you can't see any danger for the future the way things are moving. We need to stop all this data collection on people. This data is being used already, for commercial matters and as a matter of fact for spying and mind control. One have to be nut to yell "conspiracy theory" when the fact is spreaded all over the news. Just go for curiosity on Wikileaks or Snowden files, just be curious. I'm not american and i'm not native english speaking, broader you vision.
You might be the parody has someone who seems to not care about privacy at all.
I'm not american and I'm not native english speaking, broader you vision a bit please, you understood my point, how many languages should I speak and write fluently to have your attention ? Oh and how many ones do YOU speak and write fluently ?
Anand is my roommate. He's been doing this non-stop for the last 2-3 months (but thinking about it for the last 9), including while traveling internationally for the first month after he quit his job. The last month has been nightly design critiques after I got home from work :D
His handle sounds familiar. Did he used to run a design company called Dragon--or something along those lines? If so I've been impressed by his design work for a long time. Really interesting to see how his work has evolved.
Kind of random, but why is there so much time (entire days) spent in hotels when traveling? Is that due to Foursquare (or whatever) not allowing you to check-in to other places or did you really stay in the hotel the entire time? If so, doing what?
It's a genuine question--I basically NEVER stay in hotels beyond the required sleep time, so I'm curious as to how other people do things.
The data is accurate. Probably mostly sleeping, working or eating. There is a bit of a bias towards those being the most noticeable places since you spend a lot of time there, while other stuff you do may only be for 10-15 minutes and relatively is very little. You may be surprised by how much actual time you spend at home or a hotel even though it feels like you've gone out and done a lot of stuff during the day — by percentage of total time in a day it may not be that much.
Also many places have a lot of nice facilities that might still count as being at the location like restaurants, bars, rooftops, pools, beaches, gym, etc.
Just looked through it again and I think the lack of time difference is causing what you're talking about.
All of this stuff is fixed on pacific time, even when halfway across the world. So in Asia, the middle of the day will show boring sleep at the hotel, and the actual activity gets split up at the beginning and ends of the timeline.
Not ideal but I haven't figured out a good solution for that yet.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadWhat I really like about Moves is how comprehensive it is — it has every single place you went to rather than just ones that you thought were worth checking into, etc. What turns out to be relevant or helpful data to have is hard to know except in hindsight.
I think the point of the submission was to highlight the quality of the site. Not some strangers fitness level.
I would be interested in a turnkey solution with modular components that would allow people to quickly "snap" together a site like this.
BTW, anyone knows why it is Nicholas Felton and feltron.com? (with and without "r")?
What I am wondering, though is: how are the vitamin/mineral stats on http://aprilzero.com/sport/ generated? Is there a way to self-measure these stats without blood tests?
The blood levels are coming from a standard blood test, available at any doctor's office. I've been getting them about once a month.
You need to fast for at least 8 hours prior to get accurate results, and it takes about 2 vials of blood. I'm waiting for some sort of device to give you realtime values with just a prick of blood or constant monitoring.
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/using-sensors-to-track-your-e...
PS. The website is well done, but in all fairness, similar websites were made in Flash more than 10 years ago.
I genuinely wonder though what to do of it. I can't seem to see what people do with all this data; what does one get from knowing how many steps, run, calories, subway stops and hours of sleep were accounted for in a day, every day.
I can see how one could be rigorous enough with his training to see value in some of it, similarly I would see myself trying to improve my sleep patterns. But really, so far, people I've met use this as yet another distraction.
I have yet to meet anybody who has been leveraging the data they collect; most (all?) people I know eat healthy, exercise and sleep well do so without relying on devices. Now, once we're able to track real health related data continuously, we may be able to detect illness or problems as soon as they arise and effectively create a feedback lookp. But from where I stand, as of today, these things are just gimmicks.
Another thing I noticed was that I feel asleep faster if I didn't listen to music or podcasts. I've listened to them for years thinking it helped me fall asleep more quickly but using the app for a week I was able to prove that false. Obviously my data set it very small but the changes seem to be working.
If you collect data on lots of different things all of these small changes/improvements you make could add up to a noticeable difference in quality of life. The holy grail of course is software that can analyse all of these data points and recommend changes.
More seriously, there's plenty of literature out there about these things; spend 5 minutes on Google and you'll find all of these recommendations. You'll know that exercising will help you sleep. You'll read as well that screens tend to disturb our sleeping patterns. These are becoming common sense and shouldn't require you to run you own little experiment to figure it out.
If you want to improve the quality of your life, I doubt a fitbit will help you. You already know what you should be doing starting with the obvious ones:
- Exercise more,
- Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...),
- Sleep more,
- Drink less.
1) Saying "well, you could just find this information some other way" may be true but useless - everyone has different mechanisms that work well for them. If it takes a device or app or whatever for someone to stick with a change they want to make, then good for them.
2) While there is definitely some general health and fitness advice that would benefit most people, it's terribly naive to believe the story ends there. Population averages are just that, every person will also have specific mechanisms and effects that are important to their own wellbeing and not particularly generalizable.
1. It matters to me because I see this as a waste of resources (hardware, software, brains) for something that is near obvious. While it's anyone's choice to consume the way they want, I am just morally opposed to it.
2. What these apps address are general health/fitness metrics, in a very superficial manner. As I said, once we have more meaningful tracking I'll be onboard, for now these are rudimentary toys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirst#Elderly
You pretty much have to tell old people to drink, after they're too old to know they need to drink.
Its also "semi well known" that cold weather tends to mask thirst symptoms, and the resulting dehydration doesn't help much WRT hypothermia prevention, so this claim is, again, not people in general, but the subset of people in an environment colder than they're used to.
Beyond those two metrics I can't think of anything it'd be useful to check regularly. Reflex time or achilles reflex test might be good.
I'm just assuming that you are within the average age group of hacker news readers (somewhere between 20 and 40 years) it's not really recommended for you to be above 75bpm.
The idea that a lower pulse rate is better comes from the observation that endurance athletes have low resting pulse rates, and it is generally assumed that endurance exercise is healthy. The truth is that high volume exercise suppresses the metabolism and compromises health.
Here's a counter-claim: "A normal resting heart rate for adults ranges from 60 to 100 beats a minute.
Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness. For example, a well-trained athlete might have a normal resting heart rate closer to 40 beats a minute."
Source: Mayo Clinic, http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/fitness/expert-answ...
Sprinters and strength athletes do no get a suppressed heart rate. It's only endurance athletes and others who train high volume.
This is well understood by a lot of trainers. Low pulse and low body temperature in the morning is an easy way to measure over-training.
People need to get it through their heads that highly trained "fit" athletes are not very healthy, as a general rule. They tend to develop problems relatively young. Marathon running is worst of all, each marathon run showing a statistical reduction in life span.
- Exercise more, - Eat more healthy (less carbs/sugar/processed food, more vegetables and regular meat/fish/eggs...), - Sleep more, - Drink less.
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And as an insomniac I was having trouble with 'sleep more'. People with worse insomnia than me have to go sleep clinics to work out how to improve their situation. Mine wasn't bad enough to warrant that but fortunately there was an app to allow me to do a little of my own research. Without it I wouldn't be able to tell the time it took me to fall asleep - as I would be asleep.
Podcasts and music don't require screens, though, so I don't see why you're assuming that was the problem.
Google does not interpolate those suggestions from your personal data, that's where the fitbit etc. apps shine.
- Having a glass of water - Going for a short walk - Having a glass of wine - Watching a movie/tv show with your partner - Telling a bedtime story to your kids - Washing the dishes while thinking about your day - Talking to your mum/dad/bro/sis - listening to some calming music - having a shower
How would you know what contributed to your good night sleep?
Having an app/tool tracking these for you and telling you that your best sleep is when you do A C and F not E or G is very valuable.
If you are smart enough to track and figure it out, then heck, I think you have too much free time or you are highly intuitive of yourself
But still gathering al this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later somebody will figure out how to use the data so well that it could ( algorithm / AI ) could determine what you should do today to reach a certain goal to stay healthy which you messed up a day before? For example, people who work out a lot and live on a diet, might some day indulge in something without really wanting to and all this data could tell how much ( theoretically ) will affect your health so what you should do today to make up for yesterday (?).
Think about this on much broader aspect, too much of something eventually is bad. Nobody is going to tell you forever to stop something until you stop, apps like this could gather data and at the end of a week/month/quarter could tell you your score and could rather calculate the risk of xxxx disease/illness which could happen because of your bad eating habits.
All this data could be synced with your medical file/with your doctor in order to keep tabs on your health and push personalised notifications of what and what not to do or just be cautious/warning.
I don't know if such thing really already exists or possible or even good but all this data could be tapped in and used much better way.
Oh and no clue why all this data should be social or public. IMO, it should be private and shared within family/concerned people.
What exercise data can tell you is if your gaining or losing ground. So, if you do 10k in the same time but your heart rate is higher or lower that means something. But it's not going to correlate with a say a 1% increase of diabetes because we just don't run studies with that much detail yet.
Your data over a period of few months might make more sense to understand what ill-effects certain things have had on you. Think about 1 year's worth of your data being analysed to tell what certain things have had certain health related changes in you. Of course it still would take time to know how the changes you make will change things in you but based on your past data it could predict perhaps?
If you're overweight, you don't need to check on your smart-watch to know it. If you're drinking too much, you probably know about it already. And if you refuse to recognize it, I'm not sure numbers will help you. You don't need an AI to see that if you're 5 times a week at the pub for an average of 2 hours, you may have a problem.
There seems to be a strong belief that these things are hard to evaluate on your own, that the body is something mystical that can't seem to have any obvious logic. Yet we refuse to listen to the very basic, and reliable, signals our bodies broadcast.
Now if you're diabetic, or developing an illness, having a silent device continuously testing your blood would help. But we're far from it.
Nobody gets overweight overnight. You might not end up being 'overweight' if you know your certain eating habit will end up being bad for you ( everybody has a different metabolism rate ) so you cannot say eating xxxxx causes your friend to gain weight so will it you gain weight if you eat it out of moderation. All the data being collected individually and studied/analysed over time for 'you' is what could change.
Everything you say is right and approximations have been working good for everyone till now, but there is never harm to move from approximations and assumptions to absolute certainty about a few things we can measure ( now ).
This data could help you know when is the right time to test your blood maybe?
I don't agree that approximation are better than zero data; people are already self-diagnosing a lot, without the understanding that numbers, averages and science in that field are not as accurate as we'd like it to be. It takes a physician to accurately guess what may be good/wrong with you (and I mean guess).
Ultimately, I feel there's enough big, obvious metrics you can derive from your body without strapping a fitbit on.
>...But still gathering all this data religiously is good ( I haven't yet ) as sooner or later....
Also, Physicians do not accurately take the data. They ultimately diagnose/analyse the data they get from tests/devices/you.
You should read my earlier replies keep in mind that nobody here said that the data could be used to STOP going to doctors, it would rather help us skip a few visits but ultimately of course if something tells you, you are going to be sick ( gadget or sixth sense ) you'll need to go to your medical practitioner. Doctors and hospitals can never be replaced.
Keeping yourself healthy is different from falling sick.
When I started seriously lifting, I collected some bench marks. I collected my one rep max, six rep max and ten rep max in four different exercises. Then, I collected data on my pulse rate after doing a ten rep set in various exercises.
When I work out, I collect what exercises I performed, how many sets/reps, and what kinds of weight I lifted. And, I intended to check my benchmarks once a month, but in practice it has worked out to be closer to every six weeks.
Roughly nine months later and collecting that data has proven very beneficial. For example, with strength training it is too easy to get into a routine and then keep banging out that same routine every day. I always know what I did the last time I worked a muscle group, so I feel intense pressure from myself to either move a few more pounds, bang out another set, or add a few more reps to a set. And, I get to track how various lifestyle changes interact with strengh training.
For example, in December, I broke my right thumb cross country skiing and had to take some time off lifting. Weirdly, the time off actually increased my bench and shoulder presses because I was using my left (non-dominant) side significantly more often. Balancing my right and left sides made me significantly stronger.
Or, in May, the snow was gone so I started jogging again. Jogging improved some aspects of my lifting - for example, my heart rate after a set has dropped since I added in jogging. But, it has also hurt other aspects - for example, my gains in strength are actually slowing. Incidentally, monitoring my jogging showed me that my tendency to settle into a routine carries across into other forms of exercise. I realized that I was running the same route every single time in roughly the exact same amount of time. My body got used to a level of effort and then stopped getting better.
Just because the 'people you have met' use this as a distraction does not mean that everyone will. And, just because all the people you know eat well and exercise regularly, it doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people find that the simple act of tracking their performance keeps them motivated to continuously improve. Others have goals beyond 'be healthy' and need to monitor their progress if they have any hope of reaching their goals.
This is the trifecta of slow—consistently low mileage, no hills and running at the same speed every workout.
Why do I care to document where I went or which rock I climbed. Has narcissism finally become socially acceptable?
Things like climbing (which I also do) don't have automatic trackers, and tracking food intake is just too cumbersome these days for me to even try and keep up with that.
If there were better ways to automate these things and better APIs available to pull these things in automatically, I'd totally build something like this. I just don't have the time, inclination, or the energy to manually add the climbs, the calories, every food item, and myriad other things into the system.
So I'll say this: it's beautiful and full of very, very cool info. I just wouldn't do it myself unless I could generate all of that data. A handful of commits to build the site, and then let it update itself automatically via APIs. Granted, this means my site would be a bit less interesting, since the most interesting things on here are things you can't automatically track... but I'm working on plenty of other interesting things, and this just doesn't rate high enough on my list to do.
I'm jealous, though. Very well done.
Food intake, water intake, caffeine intake, many forms of exercise, and even the work you do daily (depending on job) aren't easy to track. Jawbone UP have a nice caffeine app that is useful if you remember to use it. I've heard of water bottles which register the movement of a sip. I still haven't found a food tracker that works for me - MyFitnessPal is the universally acclaimed one but I loathe it. Taking photos of one's food is a simple enough proxy if you aren't interested in the overall nutritional composition but more the qualitative part (and you can actually outsource and - to a small extent - automate nutritional tagging from photos). But yes, we are a long way away from being able to let much of this data be tracked automatically.
I think the important part is to figure out what questions you want to ask, if you aren't dedicated to tracking for its own sake. Are you having trouble focusing in the afternoon? Do you want to figure out if your sleep is a factor? Track your sleep religiously and go from there.
[1] http://aprilzero.com/explorer/march-2014/29/
It's also smart to record the data yourself instead of sharing it with a health tracking app. With due respect to those projects, I draw a line at sharing specific and private health information. I've arrived at this personal stance after weighing the benefits of information sharing against the risks of my data being leaked, mishandled or mined.
I agree but recently I read that doctors tend to completely discount this type of data provided by a patient as they can't verify it's accuracy (did the patient collect the data correctly) and it would be risky to base their diagnosis on it.
Even if that is the case I think it can be very useful for people with chronic conditions. They can find out ways to minimise their pain through this kind of tracking/trial and error which a doctor would never have the time to do.
In general he has a few global objects which seem to contain everything for each section; ajax requests, animations (which are webkit only as far as I can tell) etc. Most of it is done via jQuery.
So that's why people were calling it pretty. It does actually look good with all that prefix nonsense fixed.
Seems odd to use prefixes for things that were unprefixed 2years ago in Firefox.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/aurora-16-is-out/
I won't go so far as to say stop using prefixes, but ALWAYS include the unprefixed version last in the CSS stack. It's so easy with Sass also.
However, I'm genuinely not sure what the purpose of this dashboard is other than as a résumé piece. What questions does it answer? How is it better than doing specific investigations using R?
??!!!
So nobody feel that tracking everything you do every second and log it in real time and forever on a server is terribly frightening ?!!!!
In 2005 i predicted every one who ever logged on facebook would regret it one day and pay a huge price for it. This is more than real now. Still you don't stop, and now you're sending to "them" in realtime your heartbeats, your weight, what you yeat, etc.
Did you just forgot about LIFE ? Is this the next American Way of life ? So yout think totalitarism is Iran or Syria ? Pouarrrk !!!
You guys are totally out of your minds. Seriously.
This is beautiful, voluntary and insightful.
Dave Eggers novel _The Circle_ looks at this, and while I felt it was hyperbolic and more than a little preachy, it's certainly worth thinking about.
Oh my god, how old are you all ? Are you the next generation of this world ? Don't you just understand you behave like products and not human !? This is possibly the end of the world.
One will have to kill me before seeing me wearing a tracking device.
Are you saying you don't carry a cellphone? How has that decision impacted your daily life?
I just can't understand you can't see any danger for the future the way things are moving. We need to stop all this data collection on people. This data is being used already, for commercial matters and as a matter of fact for spying and mind control. One have to be nut to yell "conspiracy theory" when the fact is spreaded all over the news. Just go for curiosity on Wikileaks or Snowden files, just be curious. I'm not american and i'm not native english speaking, broader you vision.
Your point might be better expressed with correct spelling and punctuation.
I'm not american and I'm not native english speaking, broader you vision a bit please, you understood my point, how many languages should I speak and write fluently to have your attention ? Oh and how many ones do YOU speak and write fluently ?
It's a genuine question--I basically NEVER stay in hotels beyond the required sleep time, so I'm curious as to how other people do things.
Also many places have a lot of nice facilities that might still count as being at the location like restaurants, bars, rooftops, pools, beaches, gym, etc.
All of this stuff is fixed on pacific time, even when halfway across the world. So in Asia, the middle of the day will show boring sleep at the hotel, and the actual activity gets split up at the beginning and ends of the timeline.
Not ideal but I haven't figured out a good solution for that yet.