CureTogether Blog » Health Tracking http://curetogether.com/blog Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:28:15 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Stories of Data-Driven Lives http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/04/30/stories-of-data-driven-lives/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/04/30/stories-of-data-driven-lives/#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:17:26 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=1244 Does data drive your life? For some people, measuring and tracking themselves is a self-exploration process. Many stories can be found at The Quantified Self (where I am a blogger).

One of the founders of Quantified Self, Gary Wolf of WIRED Magazine, just wrote this article in the New York Times Magazine called The Data-Driven Life. CureTogether is mentioned twice in the article – yay! Here is an excerpt:

Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

What could you learn by incorporating more data into your life?

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2010/04/30/stories-of-data-driven-lives/feed/ 1 5 Free Self-Tracking Tools to Help You Get In Shape http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/29/5-free-self-tracking-tools-to-help-you-get-in-shape/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/29/5-free-self-tracking-tools-to-help-you-get-in-shape/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:46:49 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=1030 inshape

It’s easier than ever to get in amazing shape. (Photo: mikebaird)                    

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OK, so we all indulge a bit extra over the holidays.

Cozy family gatherings, festive parties, and the mass consumption frenzy that surrounds us, even if we’re trying to keep things simple.

Fortunately, the new year always gives us a chance to start fresh. And this year it will be so much easier to stick to your resolutions, thanks to the explosion of self-tracking tools 2009 has seen.

Here are my top 5 to help you get going:
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1. #getupandmove

Picture 10This is the best new app I’ve tried in a while. Hot off the press from the brilliant @jensmccabe and @shazow, #getupandmove is a lightweight Twitter app where you challenge your online friends to exercise with you.

For me, having virtual running buddies has been amazingly motivating, fun, and a great way to stay healthy while connecting with friends. Thank you, Jen!
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2. DailyBurnPicture 13

Ever tried to calculate and record calories on paper? It’s frustrating and cumbersome. That’s why I was excited to find DailyBurn‘s free iPhone app that takes care of it for me.

Not only does it have a great database that includes most grocery store brands and even many restaurant meals, but it calculates my ratio of fat/carbs/protein during the day, so I know how to balance the rest of my meals.

You can set target ranges and earn little apple icon rewards for meeting them. So easy to use, it’s a must-try if you have an iPhone.
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3. RunKeeper

Picture 17Here’s another one of my daily staples. I wake up, put on my running shoes, fire up my iPhone, and I’m off!

Running is so much easier with the free GPS-based RunKeeper app. It tracks how far you’ve gone, how long you’ve been running, your pace, and even a map of your route. (It works great for walking too.)

RunKeeper and DailyBurn both have Pro versions with extra features that you can upgrade to, but I find the free versions more than adequate for my needs.

I’m actually training for my first marathon now, thanks in large part to inspiration and ease from these first 3 apps.
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4. CureTogether

Picture 18Yes, this one is a shameless plug. :)

Thousands of people have been tracking over 100 different measures of their health over the past year at CureTogether. It’s been amazing to see the range of what people track, from mood to sleep to miles to supplements.

You can track yourself for free here, and we’ll soon be announcing (drumroll, please!) a Pro version that includes advanced analytics for your health and lets you connect with people who match your health profile. Join in the fun and stay tuned!
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5. Personal Informatics

If you like brain candy, check out Ian Li’s Personal Informatics site. Ian does research at Carnegie Mellon University, and he has put together this amazingly beautiful, categorized list of all the self-tracking tools he could find. It’s fun to look around, and you just might find a gem that makes your life wonderful.

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So these are my 5 favorites for getting in shape – free, easy, and fun. (If you have any other favorites, please let me know in the comments.)

Wishing you a happy, healthy new year!
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Related Posts:

- Why Track Yourself?

- Quantifying Myself: my self-tracking story at the Quantified Self

- Top 10 Innovations at TEDMED

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/29/5-free-self-tracking-tools-to-help-you-get-in-shape/feed/ 9 CureTogether in h+ Magazine http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/09/curetogether-in-h-magazine/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/09/curetogether-in-h-magazine/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:10:30 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=887 self-tracking

h+ Magazine asked me to write an article about self-tracking, so I did! It’s in the Winter Issue of h+, available for download now.

It talks about Gordon Bell’s self-tracking work at Microsoft, the Quantified Self, my own tracking, and CureTogether.

I think the Quantified Life is worth living, do you?

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/09/curetogether-in-h-magazine/feed/ 0 I, Medicine: Predictive Biometrics and Health Optimization http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/06/i-medicine-predictive-biometrics-and-health-optimization/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/06/i-medicine-predictive-biometrics-and-health-optimization/#comments Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:57:11 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=843 bardThis is a guest post from Bard Canning, a CureTogether member from Australia and self-tracker who has made some interesting discoveries about his own health. Thanks Bard for sharing your thoughts, perspective, and a link to your own self-tracking system!

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The most important online applications to be developed since the birth of the Internet are less than a decade away, yet they remain largely off the radar of investors and web-developers. These applications are optimizers for the most important thing we have – our health.

Here’s why…

A couple of years ago IBM released a report that stated that by 2011 the total amount of data in the world may be doubling every eleven hours. I believe that this prediction will be more than met by the surge in self-tracking devices that will be released over the coming years.

The spread of ubiquitous micro-trackers will make health data collection cheaper and easier. The self-tracking hardware and software will no doubt be unified by cloud computing and result in a ‘perfect storm’ of accessible and highly effective health optimizers.

It’s an important convergence of technology and timing.

Imagine if the computer industry was nothing but repairmen that tried to salvage PCs in the last stages of severe virus infections. It would be a pretty bleak situation, yet that is the current state of the health-care system. For the most part, people are only treated once they have become sick and even then with largely disappointing results.
The computer industry, on the other hand, has an endless supply of optimization tools that improve efficiency and user experience long before the computer has become ‘sick’. Defraggers, registry cleaners and driver updaters are just some of the tools in use.
I believe that the coming decade will bring with it a surge in online self-optimization applications. I also believe that the results for people’s health will go far beyond current expectations.

My personal story is that I have an hereditary immunological condition that I have struggled with for some years. Like many people that I have met, I felt dissatisfied with the health-care system and decided to take matters into my own hands to try and improve my health.

I did manage to track down the cause of my health problems and have since made great progress in my treatment. At the same time I developed my own self-quantification system that allowed me greater insight into how the medications and lifestyle choices I was taking were affecting my health.

bard spreadsheet1
What fascinated me was that when I entered one month’s worth of self-tracking data into my system it reached the same result that had taken me over a year to find through old-fashioned trial and error. This translated to a 20-fold improvement in efficiency.
I did feel disappointment that I hadn’t developed this tool years ago but also became excited about what discoveries it would lead me to next. I had become acutely aware of the potential of self-quantification tools.
Our very experience of life is filtered through our current state of physical and mental health. Having less than optimal health fundamentally affects the quality of our lives.
Right now our health-care system is a largely disorganized, anemic beast that advances with painful slowness and inefficiency.
Thankfully, as medicine is gradually transformed into an information technology, we will see an exponential acceleration in advancement.
My concept is to take it one step further and open up our medical laboratories to encompass the great experiment that is the human race. Every day billions of people test out drugs and treatments in their own homes, but this data is largely lost, or relegated to unreliable analogies. I am committed to changing that.
Humans are quite bad at deciphering patterns over time. We can be good at recognizing patterns over short periods but over days or weeks our perception becomes extremely poor. We often miss obvious connections with our health while simultaneously making false positives. For example, someone might swear that a placebo treatment such as homeopathy cured their hay-fever while completely ignoring the fact that three days of rain had washed away the pollen from the air.
A personal biometrics system sees through all the noise and is unswayed by personal biases or wish-thinking. It also has the potential to negate or eliminate the placebo effect from subjective results but this is a deeper area that requires some clever mathematics and development.
The problem with a condition like mine (and conditions such as chronic pain, chronic fatigue, fybromyalgia, migraine, and so on) is that they usually involve multiple organs and can be extremely difficult to diagnose and treat effectively. They can affect the homeostasis of the body’s nervous system leading to debilitating allostasis. I have my own theories about the mechanisms behind many of these conditions, but one man’s opinion is merely conjecture and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
What is significant are measurable observations and results about people’s health gained from multiple data points. Yes, it is true that the self-quantification concept revolves around gathering self-reporting data, which can be notoriously unreliable from a medical research stand-point, but the era of the Internet brings with it a new paradigm – truly massive numbers. Massive numbers of individuals from which to gather data, and, even more excitingly, massive amounts of data gathered on each individual.
As we can see with sites like Curetogether.com, the results we obtain can be surprisingly accurate and comparable to those obtained through more traditional means.
I believe that in the next decade people will become increasingly comfortable with the idea of self-quantification. In fact, I believe that this paradigm-shift is already happening around us. If you don’t believe me, if you think that people will not be comfortable giving up so much personal information into the cloud, then I remind you that the same contention was raised about Gmail when it was first released.
The truth is, even though it sounds dreadful to have an email service that scans your emails for personalized keyword advertising, in practice it turns out to be a small price to pay for a fantastic free service. I believe the self-quantification market will grow in very much the same way. After all, what better service can you provide than the gift of health?

I am convinced that in a decade or so we will see the refinement and clarification of our current medical knowledge as well as whole new discoveries and new avenues of research opened up by the power of ubiquitous tracking hardware and clever mathematics. Our job as developers and engineers will be to dig up the gold in the mountains of data.

The hardware is well on the way to becoming reality in our lives. From the Fit-Bit device to health-monitoring toilets (as we saw in a final-round proposal for Google’s 10 to 100 project). Now all we need is a comprehensive, well-integrated, robust, cloud-based and highly scalable software solution to take advantage of this opportunity.
That is where my interest lies, and I’m committed to collaborating with others who are heading in the same direction. I feel it has the potential to improve the health of millions, if not billions of people around the world.
By Bard Canning

I have been requested to make my personal system available online for others to experience and test out. I have made a demo with some sample data which can be viewed at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoTcUIoZTAbZdHZEdWJOTTFNZ3VybVc1cGNkRllvSWc&hl=en
The form which feeds the data into this spreadsheet can be tested at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHZEdWJOTTFNZ3VybVc1cGNkRllvSWc6MA

It’s a simple Google docs spreadsheet linked to a live form. If you need help setting bard spreadsheet 3up your own version and interpreting results, feel free to contact me at bardcan@gmail.com

I apologize for the intense mathematical format of the spreadsheet, but I have not had time yet to develop a proper, simpler user-interface for it. Ultimately, I believe it will have a very slick, minimalist natural-language interface that will hide most of the complicated math.

The correlation table uses the basic correlative coefficient to calculate the strength of the relationship between two series of data. The relationship is either positive (the values rise together, eg: weight gain and chocolate consumed) or negative (the values head in opposite directions, eg: weight gained and minutes exercise).

I use text coloring rules based on the strength of the correlations to draw the user’s attention towards the most important relationships. For example, in my data I quickly found that there was a strong negative correlation between my nasal congestion and how I felt each day. This focused my efforts on reducing my severe allergies and to my surprise I found that when treated effectively, many of my other symptoms, such as asthma, reflux, insomnia and headaches also reduced a great deal. It is these kind of indirect discoveries that we can make using a correlative system like mine.
The fascinating relationship between the autonomic nervous system, allergies, mood and chronic fatigue is the topic of a book I am currently writing.
I should point out that I am not a statistician or trained data-miner, so the algorithms in my system are still rudimentary. I look forward to connecting with others in this growing self-quantification community so that I can further develop my system.
]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/12/06/i-medicine-predictive-biometrics-and-health-optimization/feed/ 4 Winning Mayo Clinic Talk on the Future of Health http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/10/01/winning-mayo-clinic-talk-on-the-future-of-health/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/10/01/winning-mayo-clinic-talk-on-the-future-of-health/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:24:03 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=707 Click here to watch this talk

Picture 12

I was recently at the Mayo Clinic Transforming Healthcare Symposium to give a talk on how Self-Tracking will change the future of health. Here is an overview of the talk, as well as slides and video…

“The New Wave of Self-Tracking
Ubiquitous, invisible biosensors. Constant, streaming measurements. Analytics for your health.

Detailed self-tracking will transform our understanding of our bodies, our health, and our medicine. Geeks are already tracking everything from calories to blood pressure to steps taken during the day (Quantified Self). People with chronic conditions track their treatments, pain levels, and side effects (CureTogether).

The ultimate promise when this goes mainstream is true personalized medicine, where each person gets a treatment plan individual to their body. It’s an exciting future, and the seeds are being planted now.”

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/10/01/winning-mayo-clinic-talk-on-the-future-of-health/feed/ 0 The 21 Things People Track at CureTogether http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/23/the-21-things-people-track-at-curetogether/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/23/the-21-things-people-track-at-curetogether/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:12:53 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=505 After the recent release of the “track anything you want” feature at CureTogether, a flurry of self-tracking happened. People started measuring themselves every day. They added new measures to track, some of which were wonderfully surprising.

Tracking happens right on the CureTogether home page after you log in, or using our iGoogle widget. Here’s the list of what people are tracking today:

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Sample CureTogether self-tracking graph

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  • Adderall time (1 and 2, times drug taken)
  • BMI (%)
  • Blood pressure (Sys and Dia, mmHg)
  • Calories burned (cal)
  • Caloric intake (cal)
  • Count my blessings
  • Exercise (minutes)
  • Hydration (%)
  • Laughter (units)
  • Meal time (1-4, time)
  • Mood (units)
  • Nap (min)
  • Peak flow (units)
  • Productivity (pages)
  • Pulse (BPM)
  • Sleep (hours)
  • Sleep time (time)
  • Temperature (degrees)
  • Wake time (time)
  • Walk/run (miles)
  • Web-networking (hrs)

Anyone can add a new measure to track. Everyone can see the measures other people are tracking. You choose what to track for yourself and watch the trend graph change every day.

The question is, what do you want to track?

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/23/the-21-things-people-track-at-curetogether/feed/ 0 First Crowdsourced Book on Endometriosis Released http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/12/first-crowdsourced-book-on-endometriosis-released/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/12/first-crowdsourced-book-on-endometriosis-released/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:22:02 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=500

We are excited to announce today the release of “Endometriosis Heroes: 137 Women Share Their Experiences and Treatments.”
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What’s Inside?

137 women share stories, symptoms, and resources
Surprising data on co-morbid conditions
Detailed comments on treatments by real patients
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Please spread the word!

Blog or tweet http://www.curetogether.org/EHeroes

All proceeds from Endometriosis Heroes go to fund the endometriosis data community at CureTogether.org. A FREE PDF version is available if you invite 19 friends to CureTogether.

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What People Are Saying

“Congrats – hands together for you and the amazing disruptive women at CureTogether!” — Jen McCabe Gorman (@jenmccabegorman on Twitter)

“Health 2.0 in action. CureTogether uses real patient stories to bring light to under-recognized condition Endometriosis.” — Chris Hogg (@cwhogg on Twitter)

“With endometriosis, early diagnosis is important. I went from age 13 to age 23 undiagnosed. This is a common time lag for endo diagnosis. There should NOT be such a lag! Endometriosis awareness matters!!” — Jeanne, of Jeanne’s Endo Blog

“This is great. I am just starting to really appreciate what awesome power CureTogether can have.” — CureTogether member

To order your copy, visit http://curetogether.com/EHeroes/

Thank you for your support!

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UPDATE: Since the book release, we have received comments expressing concern about hysterectomy being rated highly as a treatment for endometriosis in the book. In order to balance this view, please read this post: http://endochick.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/jeannes-endo-blog-new-post-hysterectomy-story/

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/03/12/first-crowdsourced-book-on-endometriosis-released/feed/ 0 The Personal Side of Tracking http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/22/the-personal-side-of-tracking/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/22/the-personal-side-of-tracking/#comments Sun, 22 Feb 2009 15:46:18 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=423 Here’s a quick slideshow I put together about what I learned over 5 months of tracking my health, from August 08 to January 09.

Quantified Self Jan 09 – The Personal Side Of Tracking
]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/22/the-personal-side-of-tracking/feed/ 0 Why Track Yourself? http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/19/why-track-yourself/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/19/why-track-yourself/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:16:06 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=415 With all the media attention on self-tracking lately (Wall Street Journal, Globe and Mail, GOOD), you might be wondering whether to give it a try for yourself. But the polarized comments on these articles and the labeling of self-tracking as narcissism might be causing doubt.

Here’s a special guest post from CureTogether co-founder Daniel Reda to offer reasons for why tracking yourself is a good idea. And a beautiful image compiled by the Globe and Mail, on the cover of today’s Life section.

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“Whether it’s science, business, politics or your personal life, you can’t effectively understand, manage or improve what you don’t measure.

trackHuman intuitive judgments, even those of experts, are systematically biased. Hundreds of studies have revealed that our decision making, memories, evaluations, estimates (e.g. how long a project will take to complete) and even assessments of how happy something made us in the past or predictions of how happy we would be if something happened in the future (e.g. if we won the lottery) turn out to be quite inaccurate.

It’s humbling, but increasingly clear that the human mind has been optimized over millions of years to solve certain kinds of problems essential to our survival very well (e.g. is this food safe to eat? is this a good mate? is this person a friend or a foe?). It was not optimized to practice law or medicine, do project management or even to predict what will make us happy.

Collecting data and analyzing it objectively is an effort to overcome our very real human limitations – to become better at managing all aspects of our lives, both personal and social.

Whether it’s applied to improving the quality of sex or to improving medical care in developing countries, its superiority over intuitive decisions is increasingly difficult to dispute. To label it narcissism is to judge its application, not its power.

The funny thing is that quickly dismissing it as narcissism is itself one of those intuitive judgments that turn out to be wrong when you look at the data (http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/02/are-self-trackers-narcissists.php)

You are free to live life by the seat of your pants, but you can’t deny that if you want to improve something, those who objectively measure, test and optimize will consistently achieve better results.”

]]> http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/19/why-track-yourself/feed/ 1 New Paper on Patient-Driven Health Care http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/05/new-paper-on-patient-driven-health-care/ http://curetogether.com/blog/2009/02/05/new-paper-on-patient-driven-health-care/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 03:01:56 +0000 Alexandra Carmichael http://curetogether.com/blog/?p=370 melanieswanMelanie Swan, expert on personalized medicine and advisor to CureTogether, has just published an open access article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It’s called “Emerging Patient-Driven Health Care Models: An Examination of Health Social Networks, Consumer Personalized Medicine and Quantified Self-Tracking“.
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She presents a thorough, well-documented analysis of the players and issues in the personalized health and self-tracking spaces. Recommended for anyone interested in CureTogether or the idea of patients directing their own health. It’s free and a good read!

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