FitBit & FuelBand

I want to use these two trackers just to see how much sense they make. I’ve been tracking my activities with FuelBand for about three days now and it kept telling me I consumed less than 500 calories everyday. I’d like to see if FitBit agrees and if they arrive at different conclusions, it might be interesting to visualize their discrepancies. Also it’d be fun to compare my data with other people’s data made public online. I’m almost positive that I’m the more stationary type of person and I can now find some prove.

Google Web History

I spend many hours in front of my laptop everyday so my web browsing history can certainly create an interesting image of myself. Browser data might also be combined with energy consumption data from FitBit/FuelBand, though I’m not quite sure how yet…

Facebook

This one may seem banal but it’s just impossible to ignore data from Facebook. I’m not a big content generator for Facebook (I don’t post very often), but I’m a keen content consumer and spreader. Therefore I expect to see some pattern reflecting this preference from my Facebook data. It’d also be interesting to explore the connections between Facebook data and data from aforementioned tools.

1. Google Location History/OpenPaths – Location
I’m a google user, so all my location history is already logged into Google’s Location History. All I need to do is to keep the location enabled on my cell phone. What’s left is to figure out how to capture the data, but I’m sure there are well-tested resources already available. Google Location History is a major source! It can tell me a lot about where I spend my time, what means of transport I prefer, how many miles I’ve traveled etc.
I’ll go for OpenPaths and record fresh data if Google Location doesn’t work out.

2. Fitbit – Sleep
This is what I’m most curious about. How is the number of hours I sleep or the time I sleep related to my performance as a student? Can my sleep patterns tell me when I’m pushing it too far/too less? They say getting a good sleep is the most important thing for a rock vocalist- I may just test that out on myself. The Fitbit is crucial.

3. Emails – Time/Volume of Work
Gmail for me- similar to how Stephen Wolfram used it in his quantified self-analysis.

4. Nike+ Fuel Band – Physical Activity Level
My day’s activity, although I’m still skeptical about how this things estimates it! What are my patterns of activity over a week, how does it relate to the level of work stress/food intake?

5. RescueTime – Productivity
An application that tracks the amount of time I spend doing different tasks on my laptop: What applications I use? What’s my work/entertainment balance?

6. AskMeEvery/Giraph/DAYTUM – Custom Questionnaire
If I require to gather some data that needs to be explicitly answered by me, I’ll use one of these services. Like food preferences, mood (although there are dedicated mood apps too) etc.

7. Battery Use – Phone Usage Patterns
In Android, the battery usage indicator gives a nice visualization of how and when the phone has been used. If I get to extract that information (and if it gets stored for that long!), I can use it to see how I spend time using my phone.

The current Idea that I have for the quantifying selfie is to use data like activity(FuelBand/FitBit), Food(Daytum) and Mobile Data Usage (Onavo) to to make educated guesses about my location and activity. I also want the selfie to have a broader aspect that could possibly look at how my location, what I am eating and what I am doing can influence my move and habits.

I plan on using the Nike Fuel + the Fit Bit band to monitor my activity and sleep patterns.

I will use Daytum to track data such as mood and what I eat throughout the day.

Lastly I will use Onavo to track my data usage on my phone.

I am also looking to getting texting and calling information from to see if the quantified data collected also correlates to who i speak to.

I’d like to make use of the Nike Fuel Band and Fitbit since I’m curious to see how they work. I’ll also looking at using the Aware framework to do some basic location tracking stuff w/ my phone.  I use the MapMyRun app and am training for the Pittsburgh Marathon, so that should have a decent amount of data.  I’d also like to incorporate my finances (Quicken wants more money and is kind of crap, so I’m switching over to GNUCash with the intention).  I’d like to use data from the Zeo alarm clock I have.  I haven’t used it in a while, but I’ve got a few years of data backed up.  I might see about wiring up some home sensors as well, but I’m not sure I’ll get to that in time.

1) Wiretapping myself  – A sizable population of the internet now lives under the impression that President Obama or his administration is listening to every word we say and every step we take. The quantified self that you didn’t know is an interesting video that depicts such presumptions.

For my quantified self I wanted to look at what the NSA or other monitoring agencies would come up with had they been missing me all the time.

I decided to record all the calls that I make. For this purpose I found an android application called Android Call Recorder. It automatically records all the calls that I make and syncs them with my dropbox folder. After a month of voice data collection, I plan on running this bulk of mp3 files through our CMU’s very own speech recognition software – CMUSphinx. I then plan on organizing this data into word clouds and identifying trends and patters to see what topics I talk about the most, if there are certain words I use too much, etc etc. Should be fun!

2) Defining myself in terms of fitness – Thanks to folks at Nike and Fitbit I am now collecting data about my daily physical activity using two different devices – Nike+ Fuelband and the Fitbit One. I want to create a “selfie” where different areas of the picture are colored or shown based on how much progress fitness wise I had accomplished for a particular day.

3) Where have I been? – I am also using the beautiful OpenMaps app to track my physical location everywhere I go. The app tracks and stores where I have been and what I’ve been up to. Since I’ll be doing considerable amount of coding this semester, I then want to cross check this data with my github commits to see working in which areas has been most productive for me.

Self-Quantification Tools

750 Words

750 Words is a daily writing site that encourages you to write 750 words every day. I’m a big fan of regular writing challenges (I’ve also done NaNoWriMo!), and I have used this on and off for a few years. (Sadly, I’ve never written consistently for even a whole month.)

I love that the site generates a ton of miscellaneous interesting facts and charts about your writing. Here’s the visualization of WPM (there’s also this feature where you get rewarded if you write for continuous spans of time without distractions and interruptions). But my favorite quantifications are the ones that do some text analysis and attempt to discern fuzzier, more subjective things about your writing:

It’s always kind of amusing for me to see what it looks like my writing is about. It uses the fuzzy but sometimes intriguing Regressive Imagery Dictionary.

Readmill

Readmill is a mobile app for reading ebooks, and I am particularly enchanted by how it has this incremental progress bar that shows how many sessions you read the book in, and how much progress you made in the book each time. It’s interesting to see which books I struggle with, or read at a particularly busy time of my life, or devoured in one sitting—and how that gets shown in the fractured progress bar.

The API gives you access to the reading sessions (indexed by a rough percentage of where the reader is in the book), and I keep on thinking it would be interesting to visually show someone trekking through a book and pin the highlights to specific locations—to kind of show this conceptual journey through the material.

RescueTime

RescueTime is something I’ve never used, but I like the premise. My attention can get quite scattered when I’m using my computer (checking email! editing a Google doc! reading a blog post! fiddling in Illustrator! listening to Soundcloud feed! doing homework!) so I like the idea of a utility to track how I use my computer and what kinds of activities I engage in.

Moodpanada

Actually I want to try several mood tracking apps and find a comfortable one.  I barely reflect on moods because I cannot remember my mood. It changes a lot and that would be interesting to see when and where similar moods happen and wether it relate to other  factors. What’s more, I notice that some apps classify moods with levels of good or bad, I double that if moods is that linear. Should we use 2D to demonstrate mood change with time? These are also questions I need to explore.

AskmeEvery can collects almost every kind of data  I want to collect. For example, mood, exercise, diet, reading habit and so on.  And also asking is a kind of reminding,  I think this can be a kind of self-reflection. What’s more, text by phone is very convenient because I always have a situation such as waiting a bus and want to kill a few minutes with my iPhone.

fitbit

I am interested in how the wearable devices help me do reflection to my daily activity and the data while I sleep. How these data motivate me to exercise more or how my sleep data influence my attitude to sleep or change my habit about sleep. Wearable devices are different with smartphones because they with us all the time even without a pocket. Check the data any time any wear just by a click. This experience is different with the process of picking up iPhone from pocket , unlocking the phone and then opening the apps.

Howdy All,

I never knew how interesting tracking quantitative data on myself could be. Although before this class, I was never concerned with this data, it has kind of become an obsession of mine in a short time. Some of the apps I look forward to using are…

http://daytum.com

Daytum seems like a fun way to track multiple things about the self. It will be a challenge to update constantly about myself into forms, but the option to track multiple categories of data could be beneficial and interesting to track.

http://www.sleepcycle.com

I’m really interested in this app from the stand point of self sleeping curiosity. I’m pretty sure that my sleep schedule has been out-of-whack since last semester, and it would be great to see data on it to improve myself.

http://www.fitbit.com

I absolutely can not wait to use the fitbit. The notion of a simple wrist band to automatically update data on my health is very intriguing to me. Since the start of using the Nike Fuel Band a week ago in order to track steps/cals/fuels, it has become an extension of myself. It now feels slightly weird to take it off. Almost like my wrist is missing a piece of it. Since fitbit will be tracking even more data, I look forward to it’s possibilities!

http://www.facebook.com

Almost everyone uses Facebook, especially me (more than I like sometimes). I find it interesting to track and look back at statuses from months/ years past, and reliving the data. Its almost like a pandoras box of memories, emotions, facts, or jokes. I may try to use facebook in my Self-Quantification for extra personalization.

Best,

Kevan Loney