Quantified Self

Making Waves

So far today has been enjoyable, until around noon when someone texted me with a url pointing to nu.nl, showing an article about the Data Protection Authority telling me it is forbidden for employers to use wearables to track their employees (also on tweakers.net). The research the article points to is actually two companies that run my dashboards. Before I get into details, let me state the following: The privacy of an employee is of utmost importance!

A lecture in Ghent

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture in Ghent, a beautiful city and so I decided to spend the weekend at an AirBnB host to enjoy the city! Here’s a picture I took: I’ve uploaded all the slides from the lecture on Slideshare for you to enjoy.

It was my longest lecture and I’ve learned some useful things while doing so. I find that having a storyline with little pieces is harder to keep up over longer times, so next time I will try to venture more in depth of some of my personal tracking experiments, for example my phone usage.

Quantified Phone Usage with iPython

Technology is making it easier to collect data, for example phone usage. From the 1st of January I tracked how much I’ve used my phone by installing an app called Moment. It runs in the background and silently tracks how much you use your phone. As said, the first step towards behaviour-change is providing insight in current behaviour.

Lately I’ve been exploring iPython for data-analysis and sharing snippets of data. I’ve started a Github repository that contains some notebooks I’m working on. And I’ve embedded the one below where I analyse my phone usage:

San Francisco and #QS13

Taking a week off from my study, hopping on the plane to San Francisco on monday morning at 10 o’clock. Arrived at noon and we managed to hack our way into the AirBnB place. Uptime: 24 hours. Grab a beer with Yuri and Peter. Decide to visit the Apple Store and do some misc shopping. Italian dinner. Crash on a couch. Conclusion: way better then classes I’m supposed to be in.

A quick list of all my recent things in the media

September has been good on me so far. I’ve started my third year of my bachelor degree while on the opposite end my work seems to increase. I’ve been interviewed for a new TV-programme called Toekomstmakers. It’s in dutch but the video is can be found here: I’ve also written a column about the Quantified Self an the influences it could create within the health sector. The column has been added to the book Diagnose Zorginnovatie and has been presented at the Diagnose Zorg Innovatie congres.

Building a Fitbit organisation dashboard

The Fitbit (affiliate link) is one of the best tools for activity tracking.The interface is nice and the hardware is durable and syncs wirelessly. For a personal level is good, but using group-wise or equipping all employees with a Fitbit turns out to be non-existent. During the past few days I’ve spend some time building a dashboard that lets people see the data from all users within a group. It gets all data trough the Fitbit API and summarizes it into a view per day/week/month.

QS Europe Conference

I’ve spend past weekend enjoying what I do most, submerge in a community driven event, to come out two days later sleep deprived but full with ideas and enthusiasm. As one of the organisers of the conference you might think that it’s a though thing to do, coordinating it all, but with a wonderful group of people from america and the QS Amsterdam team it was a blast! The atmosphere of the group was really great and we had almost 300 people at the venue.

Building a Personal Health Dashboard with Panic's Statusboard

When Panic released their Statusboard app and I discovered it was possible to use JSON and html to embed it into pages, my mind raced with ideas about what to build. Both the Zeo and Fitbit API offer JSON output thus could be embeddable. To give a quick overview what it looks like with dummy data embedded, have a look at the following image:

The next step is to implement a simple server side script that shapes and caches the JSON data in the correct format.

On the TV for VPRO Labyrint

Pecha Kucha about The Quantified Self and Permanent Beta