What would you do with a free BodyMedia Sensewear Armband?

In biology there is a term called “hybrid vigor” or “heterosis” which refers to an offspring’s superior qualities or vigor which result from crossbreeding genetically different plants or animals. Could it be that there might be an “Information Hybrid Vigor” or “Information Heterosis” realized by bringing together individual centric medical history, activity, and nutrition data to find successful patterns of behavior? Can we build an interpretative analysis engine that would recommend small behavior changes which would yield leveraged health benefits? What is the best “cocktail” of activity and metrics to identify those small behavior changes?

Kelly D Myers

I can think of a ton of things that I would like to monitor, although not everything might be possible with this particular device.

A little background. I’ve suffered more than ten years of some sort of fatigue. Sometimes I manage fine and sometimes (like now) I may lie in bed for hours because I don’t have the energy to do anything. I’ve taken some medical tests but so far it’s unknown what exactly I have or what could be done about it. I work part-time because I don’t have the energy for a full-time job.

Back when I had the energy to exercise it seemed that I never had the capacity to exercise very intensively for months or I would fall ill, and the illness would then nullify any progress I had made. I hardly have the motivation to try anymore, though currently I find it difficult to do even minor physical exercise with resistance bands or dumbbells at home to help with my stiff muscles. At the moment I feel that my body’s repairing mechanisms are limited in that I don’t recover from relatively minor injuries.

My sympathetic nervous system seems to be very easily agitated. An argument with my girlfriend will cause me to get very stressed, and as a result I usually get anxiety, diarrhea and raised body temperature. My heart easily starts racing.

Fatigue and sleep

Often it’s difficult for me to get up from bed in the morning. My job is thought-intensive and it’s little use for me to go to work terribly tired, so I often decide that I should sleep a little more so that I’d be more productive at work. I’d like to use this device to monitor my sleep and help me decide if I’ve slept enough.

It also happened recently that I decided that I’m too exhausted to go to work at all. I phoned by boss and thankfully he understood, but it’d help to have an objective measure of some kind to present to him.

When I’m at work I may manage fine until it’s about time for me to go. If I stay a little longer my brain often gets foggy and I end up being exhausted the rest of the evening. It’s interesting that I seem to have some raise in body temperature on these evenings. It’d be helpful if the device warned me that I’m about to get too fatigued so I should leave work now and get rest. Perhaps it could do this by monitoring my body temperature.

I often feel fatigue after work but start feeling well again an hour or two before I should go to bed (at midnight). I’d like to know why this happens. Is the light from my computer monitor doing something to my circadian clock? Is turning the screen reddish helping at all? Could it actually help to turn on all the lights and pretend I’m not trying to get sleep? In any case, I’d like to use the device to monitor the effect of different amounts and wavelengths of light on my nervous system.

Psychological stuff

Like some others have pointed out, I’d like to use this device to monitor when I’m getting too stressed or agitated. Perhaps the device would detect these from the skin conductance, vigor of movement or breathing patterns. If the device would warn me I could try to distance myself from whatever I’m doing, concentrate on my breathing technique and perhaps listen to soothing music from my phone.

I often find it difficult to concentrate on what others are saying if they’re talking for more than one minute. I’ve tried some meditation techniques but I get frustrated that my mind wanders off all the time. Could I use this device to help me with attention training by notifying me that I my mind started wandering again?

I’ve read a lot of psychological literature and self-help books and done kind of psychotherapy on myself. Perhaps I could find subjects I haven’t touched yet by presenting myself possibly emotional stimuli (photos of my now dead grandparents, childhood photos, childhood scents…) and watching if my skin conductance indicates anxiety?

Misc

I’d like to use this device to monitor how my body is doing each day. I often feel miserable, the causes may vary and I don’t always realize what’s the matter with me. Sometimes I’m tired, so is there some kind of a signature that could hint me about that? Sometimes it’s that I haven’t eaten enough – does that show up in the device’s measures somehow? Or am I actually anxious – is my sympathetic nervous system abnormally active and could the heart rate or skin conductance reveal that? Could I predict anxiety by the amount of wiggling I do (acceleremeter)?

I have some stiff muscles and they get worse if I stay in one position too long. Could I use the device to detect when that happens so I can get up and moving?

I sometimes go to a massage therapist because of my stiff muscles. I try to tell the therapist a lot if what he’s doing feels like anything or not. It occurred to me once that it’d be helpful if the therapist could see in real-time whether his massage is doing anything. I’d like to present the data of this device to the massage therapist so he could use it to guide his actions.

It seems that when I eat something with a high glycemic load (lots of something with high GI) my heart starts to beat quickly. I interpret this as a sign that my blood glucose levels just shot up. There are a lot of carbohydrate sources that I can’t eat a lot of because I start getting heartburn and acne, but the effects may show up only after days. I’d be interested in using a device to detect my body’s response to different sources of carbs so I could better predict if it’s ok for me to eat it. I would also like to know if I can somehow lessen the glucose spike (e.g. the Jaminets say that acidic sauces should do that but I haven’t tried that out), and for that I’d need a device that detects changes in my body within minutes, not within days.

If I recover from my current bout of fatigue and start exercising again, could I use this device to monitor my levels of stress? It’s not easy for me to tell if I’m too fatigued to exercise. If I skip exercising today, will my long-term well-being suffer? If I go will I slowly build up fatigue even if I manage today’s exercise? Perhaps the time between my steps (but not necessarily the amount of them) or the vigor of my movements correlate with good energy levels?

I have some problems with my stomach but I don’t know exactly what. I’ve considered trying some elimination diets but they seem like an awful lot of work and there are so many things I should try eliminating (fodmaps of all sorts, histamine, lactose, proteins in nuts…). It’d help if a device like this could give me warning signs.

I’d also love to use the device’s measures to see how my nutritional supplements or medical drugs affect my functioning, but I’m afraid there’s too much variation there and I’d need to carefully plan any experiments with myself to standardize the variables except for the one I’m interested in.

Well, here is one of my open questions that I wonder if it applies to this context:

So it seems to me one of the research thresholds we don’t know much about yet with regards to meditation is to look at states of experience beyond mindfulness or deep concentration and figure out what good physiological indicators are and more importantly, what their effects are on a human’s being.

I’m thinking of the kind of pioneering work Herbert Benson did with The Relaxation Response. Where he showed that the practices of Transcendental Meditation a) had a distinct physiological signature from sitting quietly, sleeping, and other natural states of experience and b) had profound effects for someone with hypertension in terms of alleviating or significantly reducing high blood pressure.

What got me thinking about this and the armband was an email I got recently from a friend who is doing a research study on meditation. He was looking at heart rate and galvanic skin repsonse as physiological correlates to being in a meditative state (his study was about seeing how an individual would be affected by coming into a room of people who had already been meditating – I believe testing someone meditating by joining a room of meditators vs. them meditating solo.)

So thinking about GSR and heart rate as possible correlates, I wondered what a heavy duty sensor could tell us about the signatures of meditation and the more enduring effects, a la Benson’s research. I feel like this area gets very interesting when we look at the broad scope of meditation practices becoming available to the West – like visualizations, compassion practices, inner fire practices (which explicitly raise the body temperature of the practitioner) – I think often because the bulk of our good research on meditation focuses on concentration & mindfulness based practices, our dialog about other kinds of meditation is a lot less nuanced and people are generally a lot less aware of there being many kinds of practice they could benefit from that they haven’t seen.

So – thinking about say an easy way to track GSR, heart rate, heat, and have a whole signature to look at for significant short and long-term changes from someone or many people practicing a range of practices would be interesting!

[If anyone has specific thoughts about exploring this question – out of the context of this contest – I’d be very interested to hear! More sophisticated research into the how meditation works is a big interest of mine :)]

I would use it to prepare myself for Ironman championship.

THE QUESTION: “How would you like to meet James Bond? Better yet, how would you like to become James Bond-like?”

A Layman’s Interpersonal Social Experiment that spans the entirety of an individuals well-being - from sleep, physical activity, and diet, to health, intimacy and beyond.

It’s been said that the #1 predictor of ones happiness is determined by the strength of their social relationships. With such sturdy relations leading to an improved level of happiness, one could amuse that there would be a reduction in stress and anxiety and as a result - - less inflammation in the cells and an increased ability to word off diseases and potential ailments. Preventive Healthcare through the cultivation of effective relationships.

Things I might say to myself when looking over the data that was recorded during my interpersonal communication and relationship building.

  • Using this data and the 80/20 principle, which relationships should go and which should be cultivated? Who stresses me out and why?
  • “Wow! Shouldn’t have had that coffee on an empty stomach prior to my big meeting.”
  • “How much time exactly do I need to prepare for that conference meeting in London when waking in the middle of the night?”
  • “Well, I guess I now know not to take a first date to an Indian restaurant, whoa!”
  • “What exactly do I need to say to myself to gain the courage to ask my hot co-worker out?”
    When is networking at these social mixers got me all up in a bind and did my meditation and exercise help calm my nerves?"
  • “Does a certain song really keep me motivated to work harder and longer during a workout or did I just get a good amount of sleep?”
  • “How much do I sway and migrate when at social gatherings, was I really that nervous, geeze?”
  • I knew I did most of the work in the sack, oh well, level up."

Essentially - I think it would be valuable to relate all of the data gathered from the device (diet, activity meditation, etc…) and preform social experiments to improves one’s ability to foster an intuitive understanding of what it takes to build build effective interpersonal relationships - from the communication of creative ideas to networking gigs.

I have found that my mood does not correlate with soundness of judgment. When I’m feeling content, I often make decisions that come back to hurt me in the future. Alternatively, when I’m critical and grouchy I’ve found I’m a better poker player but no fun to be around. The big question that I would like to answer is:

Can I predict when I am most likely to make good decisions, be socially enjoyable to be with (some might say never :slight_smile: ), be in a good mood? And the inverse–when should I avoid making decisions, making social contact, and maybe just take a nap?

I would like to try to correlate the galvanic skin response, heat flux, skin temperature, amount of sleep, and steps taken with mood, decision making ability, ability to remember things and sociability. Research often talks about how exercise helps the brain/mood or how more sleep is needed, but I want to know exactly how much sleep I need, how much exercise I need (and better in the morning? evening?) and how long it takes for the exercise to actually improve my abilities?

Ideally after all this data, I might learn things like:
-I remember things best 2 hours after a workout where my heart rate exceeds 150 beats per minute
-Sprinting/Interval training is best for improving mood two hours after exercise
-Judgment is not improved by exercise if I get less than 5 hours of sleep

Those last 3 points are just my guesses, I’d like to get the data to figure out the real numbers.

I’m currently running a myriad of data streams. Here’s a sample of them: location and screen time are tracked automatically; sleepiness, mood, motivation, physical and mental lethargy, etc. are self-reported every hour; mental acuity is polled every couple of hours through quantified-mind.com; sleep is tracked through iOS and android apps; lifts are recorded as I workout; food is logged through myfitnesspal; heart rate is sampled every hour through Azumio’s heart rate app.

I’m in the process of coding up a statistical machine learning engine, named “K”, that will function as a personal assistant. My vision is that K can take in my data streams in real time and spit out strong patterns that I should be aware of, and through mobile phones now or wearable computing in the future, can be aware of my contexts and offer me advices using these mined patterns in real time. For example, if K can be implemented on Google Glasses, it could issue a warning when it sees a piece of toast edging toward my mouth if it determines that such an action would increase by glycemic load, increase chance of acne, and decrease my quantified-mind scores (this correlation is actually more or less valid, based on the data I have so far). This kind of warning would be very useful to counter eating on a whim. In general, K’s advices are to be used to make sure I am not shortsighted and stay logical and always take the optimal decision.

These warnings will be more helpful the more real time data streams I have. This is where the Sensewear band can help me. With the physiological data like heat flux and galvanic skin response streamed in continuously, K can predict acute conditions much more quickly and advise me appropriately. For example: there was a week where I ate nothing but cheese and angus patties, and by the middle of the week, I was physically lethargic. I thought it was just “keto flu” as my body adjusted to low carbs, but in fact the majority of the symptom was caused by sodium and iodine deficiency. With Sensewear, my body heat flux should probably have decreased way before I became lethargic, and could be used to predict the lethargy I would have later.

Some other questions to think about:

  1. What are the physiological signs when my brain is working highly efficiently versus when it’s not?
  2. What are the physiological signs when my mood turns sour?
  3. What are the physiological signs associated with different micronutrient deficiencies and overdoses?
  4. How does my metabolism change when my caloric intake changes?
  5. What are the physiological signs when I switch a liquid only diet (soylent)?
  6. Can Sensewear predict postprandial hypotension?
  7. Could my heat flux, GSR, and skin temp predict the amount of lean mass gain when combined with my food log, workout log, and other data?

Finally, I want to note that an important part of K’s functions is to come up with patterns that I would not have thought of, for example, something that involves a complex interaction of many variables. Hence these questions definitely don’t describe all that I’m interested in in Sensewear. I look forward to discover hidden relations between heat flux, GSR, etc. and important statistics like mental acuity, body composition changes, mood, and so on.

This is very much what I would like as well. My dream is a program that will identify significant variables and alert me when conditions predict impending panic attacks, asthma attacks, OCD flare-ups, etc, prior to the point when I am consciously aware of symptoms–that is, at the level of weeks before, rather than hours. Eventually I would learn to adjust my lifestyle to permanently avoid such confluences (to the best of my ability, not much I can do about smog or the whims of hormones). When your program is ready, I hope you will share;)

Yes everything I do will eventually be open source, including K and some other projects. The caveat is that so far I only plan to develop it according to my own quantified lifestyle, but given the modular way I program it shouldn’t be hard in the future to adapt to other QSers.

The main reason i need the device is so i can track stress level’s that have gotten out of control lately. Although with the help of my doctor, things have gotten better this is something i could use to measure and track to see what is going on.

Hey QSers,

This our idea (won’t embed this time apologies Gary):
http://i.imgur.com/JfmabbT.jpg

Data is used to crate Tamagotchi of yourself in the game you are playing.

Regards,
Yosef

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That would be most impressive if it works half as well as well it shows, although with that said how many game dev’s would be able to take the time and energy to do that? I would suggest checking out full sail university and seeing if you get a proof of concept game going?

Hey bzald,

Thanks for the reply. We have developed a prototype with a group of game designers (including QS13 speaker Ellis) using the NeuroSky device in combination with a drawing game which showed acceptable results based on your relaxation and focus state. The armband however has more accurate measurements and therefore you can influence the game more accurately.

Now the cool part is that you don’t need the game developers to develop this, through simple hacks you can influence most video games (+ health, + money , +skills) , google game trainers and you’ll get the idea. It would be awesome however if you could collaborate with a game developer to make it more seamless. But you can already get a lot going with very little.

Hope that answers your question!

In additional to tracking all metrics currently possible, I would like to explore a more creative path with the armband.

I VJ at parties and would love to try if I could find a way to integrate the data provided by the Bodymedia device. I’ve played around with Arduino’s, Raw Data enabled Zeo’s and other devices as data input. Imagine having influence to the VJ by interacting or changing the music and reflect it in a visual way back to the audience. Wouldn’t it be great to explore what data could do in creative environments?

I would make a thorough investigation on how the BodyMedia Senswear could be utilised in a remote patient care environment both professionally (as a managed service) and privately (within my personal environment) and provide a thorough analysis & feedback on my findings.

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My interest is to connect the open data (government data, my data, etc. [1]) community with quantified self community. I believe that these two communities of knowledge could create something completely new by sharing ideas and practices. Personally I am not a very skilled programmer, but I am long time advocate and active in the open data movement and also a QS practitioner. My approach would be to scale up the innovation power by engaging the open data hackers (in Finland and elsewhere) to use the SenseWear system -data. Of course I would use my own somewhat limited data wrangling skills and do data exploration also by my self.

A) Data donation: I would carefully document and publish the collected data (with my other QS -data) and promote it to be used by the open data community. Promotion I would do via Apps4Finland contest [2], Open Knowledge Foundation network [3] and other channels.

B) Personal data exploration + data journalism: I would use the statistical programming language R and explore the data collected during the next summer when I practice for a big cycling event. Hopefully I could come up with a data journalistic [4] story that could be published in some sports magazine in Finland.

[1] http://blog.okfn.org/2013/02/22/open-data-my-data/
[2] http://apps4finland.fi/
[3] http://okfn.org/
[4] http://datadrivenjournalism.net/

Keeping it realistic: body & mind monitor.

Bodymedia does already a pretty good job on the “body” side of things. They developed all sort of population-specific equations (kids, obese, healthy adults, etc.), and validated them against indirect calorimeters. I guess they use activity-specific equations for energy expenditure, even though activity type is not reported.

However, improving the ability to extract contextual information can bring the device further. Given the location of the accelerometer, activity recognition is not that complex (or at least much easier than at the wrist, where correlation between activity type/intensity and movement is very weak). By analyzing context (location, activity type and intensity), and given the absence of heart rate, GSR could be used to provide insights on the stress levels during sedentary behavior (i.e. stress at work). This would require some context-based personalization techniques given the different reactions of physiological signals to different contexts, in different people. Self-calibration techniques could be applied for this, to learn over time from the user. By combining body and mind monitoring, you could even create some sort of feedback loop where staying active is motivated not only by the healthy need of having a active lifestyle, but also by the level of stress accumulated, since stress+sedentary time results in increased risks for our health (e.g. stress -> fight or flight -> adrenaline -> + blood glucose -> need for activity).

The “body” monitoring could also be improved by context or activity-based personalization/normalization techniques. For example using allometric modeling based on the activity performed, you could provide information on the actual changes in activity regardless of changes in body weight (otherwise changes in body weight would affect changes in energy expenditure and make it more difficult to understand if people undergoing physical activity interventions are actually doing more)

1-Track my mood .
2-Count frequency of )lie( I speak everyday
Effect of lie on the situation ,on the mood ,time of lie,
3-effect of mood on my daily habits

From Sara Riggare, via email:

[i][align=justify]I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone that I would like to use it to track different aspects of my Parkinson :-). Since Parkinson is a very complex disease with a wide range of symptoms, from the more obvious motor symptoms, like my slow movements and gait problems, over non-motor issues like sleep problems to autonomous dysfunction affecting the vagus nerve resulting in, among other things reduced heart rate variability and sweating, this device would be very handy. I would also like to attempt using the accelerometer to track my gait ratio, comparing the duration of my current step with the duration of the previous one.

To get the most out of the data, I would like to invite the QS community to help me analyze the results and suggest improvements in the measuring.[/align][/i]

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To begin with, have you been consulted before a doctor?