I’m been away for Labor Day weekend and not attempting to keep my measurement schedule. I did have a chance to measure just the tremor this morning. I felt very tremory and predicted a 5. But the results were actually unusually low:
090220190734.csv (269.7 KB)
@Agaricus I’ve updated this notebook a bit and shared it in @gedankenstuecke’s “exploratory” – hopefully this makes it a bit less confusing how to open and use it. (Among other things, there’s an “open in notebooks” button on this page.) https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/71/
It’s likely you see this and think “great but now I want to do X”, let me know, I can think of a variety of next steps (and others might have more ideas too). In theory this is becoming increasingly re-usable for other people, should you find anyone willing to try to reproduce your project on themselves. 
@madprime Thank you.
I got a bit tired of this project after last week, thinking: “Nobody knows how to fix it, why am I taking so much time measuring it?” However, I continued to notice (without measuring) that the tremor seemed to vary a lot. It is only very annoying a few times each day, so if I can reduce these incidents the benefit will have been worth it. I also wondered: How much time is this really taking? Is it possible I’m thinking “takes too long” because I’m just a bit discouraged for other reasons? Let’s see how long it really takes.
So, my goal is to do three days of frequent measurement, starting this morning and ending Friday. I hope to take at least 4 per day. The spreadsheet with results is here: Tremor and Blood Pressure Spreadsheet
This morning’s results:
Prediction: 130/80,70, Tremory: 1
Measurement: AVG: 132/85,60 Tremor: 4.68
The measured tremor is now showing an amplitude using @Beau_Gunderson and @madprime’s Jupyter Notebook on Open Humans. I’m going to continue to predict on my 5 point scale.
Most interesting result this morning is that I predicted very low and my results were also very low. I barely felt any feeling of “tremory.” This showed in the data. I’m interested in this because I hadn’t yet tried to do any fine motor tasks. Is there an overall sensation of tremory that may be based on subconscious noticing of difficulties performing motor actions or on other factors? I’d like to think my intuitions are reliable but it hasn’t always been the case that my predictions are accurate. Image of the measurement:
Finally: It has taken over forty minutes to complete this process. That’s a lot of time! Some of it is working out a relatively new workflow and also writing the notes. I’d really like to do this in less than 15 minutes each time, otherwise I can’t do it more than once a day.
I’m about halfway through my 3 day intensive tracking protocol. I’ve reduced the measurement time to about 7 minutes per session, which is easily manageable. But I’ve done this by focusing on data collection only - no analysis. I collect the BP measurement, which is stored in the monitor and transmitted to my phone via Bluetooth, using the BloodpressureDB app. (The app has worked well so I’m giving it a link.) I message the data from Physics Sensor Toolkit to myself using the native iOS sharing tool. I don’t update the spreadsheet or post here. I’ll check back in here at the end of the three days, assuming this continues to go well, with what I’ve learned.
Hi Gary, when I open the spreadsheet I see it empty!
My project stalled due to high complexity and I’m going restart with a simpler approach. I’m going to measure daily between 10 am and 11 am (which is a time when I often notice my tremor) and see what the variation is on a daily basis. I’ll try to complete 10 measurements. On Tuesday I tested the latest notebook iteration:
Today, after troubleshooting by @madprime, I got another graph:
I felt that today’s tremor was worse. I have a very basic question: do the numbers match my estimate of tremor severity, the way they seemed to when I looked at the pictures at the beginning of this project?
Felt very tremory this morning. The numbers were the highest yet. BUT, I measured this standing up because I’m at home and there is a lot of activity in the house: the most private place was to stand at a counter and measure. This is an unusual condition. On the other hand, I’m often annoyed by the tremor when I’m standing at a counter cooking, which involves a lot of directed movements with my fingers.
Discovery: I’m at an earlier stage of the process than I thought. I was getting ready to do a series of measurements, but I learned that I have a question about how much my posture and position might influence the measurements.
Here’s the graph and tremor score:
I learned a lot from the first phases of this project, and I’m now restarting based on what I learned. Some lessons:
My next steps are:
Right now I have a stupid problem, which is that I bought a new phone case that is more slippery than the old one. (I was cheap and didn’t want to pay Apple.) So I have to anchor the phone against a stop to keep it from slipping. Mechanically, I expect this to add stability and make it difficult (and for me impossible) to know the relationship between the new measures to old measures. I think that’s ok. I’m still in the idea generation stage, not in the prove ideas stage. In this next round of sensor measures, I’ll be starting from scratch.
Process note: I found that I’d set my iMood reminders to 7 per day, between 8 am and 10 pm. I changed this to 12 per day so I could have more reminders to assess Tremory.
You could measure tremors 16 hours a day with Mbientlabs. Included is a much better sampling rate; as high as 500Hz. Its 100 usd and nearly no warranty though.
