For me, it was a great experience and I learned even more than during #qseu13: the program was even more dense with most session descriptions reading so promising that selecting the “best ones” became quite tough. A nice location (the Casa 400) and a oerfect organisation (you won’t find a that kind of catering at other conferences) by Marcia and her team made the #qseu14 a real treat.

The Next Big Thing
And yet, this great experience is not the reason for this post. I think that the Quantified Self marks the beginning of the biggest societal shift since the Industrial Revolution. Or, to tone it a little bit down and to limit the claim to the more mundane area of economics: QS is the Next Big Thing. QS is the redistribution of power from experts and organizations to the individual. QS gives autonomy to the individual who, assessing herself through tracking tools and therefore knowing herself quantitavely and – based on data analysis – qualitatively, becomes independent from the opinion leadership of experts like medical doctors regarding the aspects of her health.

Redistribtion Of Power
In this sense, QS stands in a line with technologies and tools enabling billions of individuals of doing things formerly reserved to organizations: the internet itself, providing people with access to information, social media, enabling people to publish their own ideas, or 3D printers, enabling individuals to manufacture real products in their homes: all those redistribute power to the individual.

An Inbound Perspective
What is so special about the Quantified Self? Compared with the above mentioned technologies, QS isn’t about external tools to be used in order to do something you couldn’t before. It’s rather the inbound aspect of QS: by tracking themselves people start knowing themselves for the first time in history. It’s not about learning a new technique, it’s about learning about yourself. You use tools like wearable devices, smart clothes and apps to know yourself better and to optimize your lifestyle subsequently.

The Self
Trying to understand themselves better has kept people busy for centuries. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, Sartre and others pondered on the self, this agent responsible for the thoughts and actions of an individual. And still, the more complex the world has become, the less known the self seemed to be to their “owners”.

For instance, most aspects of health, being private affairs in earlier times, have been delegated to specialists in this field, medical doctors, psychologists and scientists. Even lifestyle health aspects as losing weight have been occupied by nutritional experts – may it even be the ubiquitous yellow press diet recommendation.

Health Care
And although we’re living longer than ever – the global life expectancy has improved to 68 years for men and 73 years for women – many health problems seem to be unsolvable. Obesity alone costs the U.S. health system more than $150 billion per year. So-called diseases of civilization have occurred or risen within the last decades, such as diabetes, cardiac diseases, specific types of cancer. And the proposed solutions of the health industry and its proponents is to cure the symptoms of these sicknesses, to produce more effective drugs and to develop the best therapies for so-called chronic diseases. As a diabetes patient, you get the diabetes treatment. No matter, if you are a 45-year-old mother, a 22-year-old obese student or a 72-year-old sporty pensioner, you get more or less the same diabetes treatment.

The Quantified Self In Health
What if it were possible to get the treatment which exactly matches your individual personal physique? What if the treatment took your complete lifestyle into account and would be adapted to your daily behavior? Or – even better: what, if a treatment would start with the prevention of diabetes by providing you with helpful advice regarding necessary behavior change based on the analysis on your realtime body data? Any health system in developed countries is based on fighting the symptoms of diseases, and on nurturing healthcare industries which need to retain their patients by providing them with drugs keeping them loyal customers. As long as the individual depends on the healthcare industry alone, he won’t get cured of diseases of civilization. There is an opportunity to leave this system, and this is the Quantified Self. As soon as the individual is provided with unbiased realtime data about his body, he can realize impending health risks and act accordingly by changing his behavior to prevent a disease. Or, he gets qualified recommendations regarding his lifestyle in order to reduce the negative effects of his chronic disease, or to even recover completely.

For sure, not everybody wants to know everything about himself, perhaps because he feels that the data would show that he’s in a very bad condition. Or, some people might just be quite insensitive towards their own health as some behaviors, such as smoking, seem to imply. And, as always, people will have to get used to track and analyze their body data consistently, as well as to learn to change their behavior based on recommendations. This latter aspect – how to motivate people to change their behavior – will be discussed in one of the next posts.

A Movement
The Quantified Self is not a technology, and it neither is an industry. It’s rather a movement, a lifestyle enabled by technologies such as apps, wearable device’s sensors and algorithms which translate body data into meaningful stories about human behavior. The Quantified Self is not powered by inventions, it isn’t owned by companies and it isn’t ‘protected’ from innovation by patents. The Quantified Self is powerd by the people, by individuals who realize that they have the ability to know and to make sense from all their data. By quantifying herself, the individual is the one who knows herself, who can change herself and therefore who can change the world. As soon as the individual becomes aware of her newly gained power, her re-gained autonomy, she will use it. And with her, billions of people.

In this post, I have pointed out the impacts of the Quantified Self on health care. There are other areas of life where we will see similar disruptive effects, e.g. education. Knowing your data makes the difference. And that’s why I think that the Quantified Self is the Next Big Thing.

What are your thoughts? Would love to read them!

The post Why Quantified Self Is The Next Big Thing appeared first on DATARELLA.

DR
Florian Schumacher, you started the first Quantified Self QS Meetup in Germany. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your QS approach?

Florian
When I learned about Quantified Self in 2011, I immediately felt attracted by its very positive culture. Consequently, I started the QS meetups in Berlin and Munich in 2012 which is a lot of fun. Besides, I am a trendscout of Wearable Technologies AG. Here, I’m dealing with all devices you can wear and the sensors which collect behavioral data.

DR
What do you track yourself and how do you do that?

Florian
I regularly and passively track my weight, my body fat, my physical activities and my sleep – all those data are collected automatically, so that’s completely effortless. Then, I manually collect sample data on my blood pressure, blood sugar, my girth, and I try to keep an eye on my haemogram. This, I do on a weekly basis. Then I track other data as time, which is quite sophisticated, since it’s not automated at all and I track everything: every project, every lunch, every activity finds its place in my calendar. So I have a good overview of how I spend my time, and how my time is devoted to my hobbies.

DR
You told us that you have lost weight – voluntarily, that is – that means tracking has very specific consequences on your life!

Florian
Yes, indeed. I have been testing QS devices for three years now. While I kind of just tested theses devices before, I have started to use them for special purposes last year. I have been trying to lose weight, I’m on a special diet and let my ape count my calorie intake. Then I check what nutritients my food actually contains. Then I exercise regularly – and by tracking all that I can understand my body’s changes very well – and I like that very much!

DR
Then for you QS is more a motivational thing, rather than a supervisory body…

Florian
QS is a control body, but more in a positive sense: by comparing different measured values I learn and get a better understanding of my body and, consequently, I get motivated and become happy even if sometimes this way is somewhat hard.

DR
Do you share your tracking data with others?

Florian
Yes, but I only share some of my data: e.g. I share my steps within my Fitbit community – but only my steps – since for me these are indiscriminate data. All other data I would share with my doctor rather than with my friends.

DR
So you draw a line at sharing your data. Could you elaborate on that a little more?

Florian
I think that’s very personal everybody should define what data to share individually. Sharing your data can be very motivating if people have mutual goals. There are studies showing that everybody will be far more successful if all share their data which each other; e.g. people lose two to three times more weight if they share their goals and data. That means in case of very personal data (e.g. illnesses) I would share my data within a closed group of likeminded people, but I think everybody should decide that by herself – and there should be some control mechanisms preventing abuse of this data.

DR
At QS13, Gary Wolf [Co-founder of the Quantified Self] said that Tracking and data sharing would become a social responsibility to provide access to important learnings to everybody. Do you agree with Gary?

Florian
I don’t think that self-tracking should become a, obligation for everybody. But what I strongly support is the anonymous sharing of data to realize potential benefits in scientific research and pharmaceutical product development. I’m sure that this will promote our culture to the next level.

DR
A last question: which tracking app or gadget do you like most?

Florian
I really like this Basis band, since it automatically tracks my sleep, my movement and it accurately calculates my calorie intake. At the moment the Basis is the most accurate tracking device on the market and I like it very much!

DR
Thank you!

Florian
Welcome!

The post Datarella People – Florian Schumacher, QS Evangelist appeared first on DATARELLA.

Matthew Jordan and Nikki Pfarr from Artefact make their case for changing the Quantified Self into Quantified Us. The first degree of meaning, that is to know your personal data, is the first step for all life loggers: by collecting data about their behavior they can compare their subjective perception of movements, food intake etc. with the reality. And get meaning from that, such as: “Ah, I see – I don’t run 10 kilometers every second day but I run 7.5 kilometers twice a week – on average.”

After having learned about oneself, the user takes action – the second degree of meaning: she buys new running shoes to please herself and then she extends her weekly parcours to 10 kilometers, completed every second day. Lesson learned, quality of life of the individual improved.

The third degree of meaning would be added, when people get advice to make better use of their – and other people’s – data in the moments when decisions are actually made. A basic requirement for the third degree is that people (anonymously) share their personal data.

Matthew and Nikki prefer a Quantified Us approach to the Quantified Self. They call for groups of like-minded people quantifying themselves and sharing their data with each other. Apps which support those groups should help the users to make it easier to collect the data and to get a personal meaning from the data.

We could not phrase that better – and this is exactly the our approach at Datarella with our app explore: By asking our users questions we make it very easy for them to track those parts of their individual behavior which cannot be tracked by sensors but have to be added manually. She does not see a blank page which he has to fill by being highly creative , but by answering questionnaires, the user is guided and is able to add lots of contents in a very short time.

Second, explore user get feedback on their own behavior as well as the behavior of other users. They can use the answers of others as benchmark – and they see their individual position within the explore community.

These two aspects let every user provide their personal individual data as useful community data: by adding her own data, everybody is acting as an important piece of the puzzle. And, as known from P2P networks, such as Skype, the result for each individual will improve with every new participant in the network or community.

Coming back to Quantified Self vs Quantified Us: yes, we totally agree that the social – or community – factor is necessary for the movement to become socially relevant. But we think that the individual – the self – is the key factor in the game: the individual must decide to participate in one of the most important movements ever, or to stand still and rely on traditional eveolutionary mechanisms.

We’d love to read your thoughts on that!

The post Quantified Self or Quantified Us – A Social Responsibility appeared first on DATARELLA.

Generally, there are two different sorts of people: tech lovers and tech skeptics. The first are open to any innovation and happily embrace new technologies, products and services. The others look for risks and potentially negative implications of new tech. Ok – that may sound a little black and white – but for this post it helps. I think, if a new technology wants to be regarded as valuable, it should demonstrate social relevance. What do I mean with that? Let me explain using the example of or app explore.

A quick reminder for those who don’t now explore: the app helps you to learn more about yourself, your behavior. It does two things:

1. it tracks you by collecting data from your smartphone’s sensors – like geolocation data, and
2. it offers you questionnaires regarding your behavior to be answered by you.

The more questions you answer, the more does explore know about you and the better is the feedback you get from explore: your behavior, presented in nice-to-read graphs, with comparisons of your own behavior with that of other explore users. explore is a quantified self app, fully functional without any additional gadget.

The goal of explore is to help you improving the quality of your life. And that’s why you provide explore with your personal data: you will learn a lot about yourself – how you behave in certain situations and how this correlates with other factors, such as weather conditions, your individual communication behavior, your stress level, etc. If, for instance, you don’t feel well for the last few days, explore might find out a strong correlation with a higher than normal coffee intake. And since we all forget quickly – we even don’t remember what we did last Monday – explore supports you by showing your behavior in a time line. That might be the first time you don’t have to speculate about the reason for your not-so-well-being, but you actually see the reason!

“The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”
Adam Smith

We are individuals, all of us are different. There is no standard recipe for illnesses or bad feelings. There are as many recipes as there are people. And this is where explore comes in: since you provide explore with your individual data, you will get individual feedback and recommendations about what to change, if necessary. And here we are: I think that our app explore – and its behavioral analytics in the background – is socially relevant.

3 Aspects of explore’s Social Relevance

1. Everybody can use explore. The app is free and there is no need of using an additional gadget like a fitness band, or else. It’s in your smartphone – with you all the time.
2. It’s absolutely easy to participate: explore asks the right questions at the right time – nobody must be overly creative and fill in an empty diary – just answer short questionnaires in under a minute.
3. Users get individual personalized recommendations to change their behavior, if necessary. No standards, but individual advice.

For me, it’s absolutely great to work with a product (and a team, of course!) that helps people to change their lives for the better. Depending on the usage and the individual user, these might be minor changes – but with every small improvement is a good one. And since human beings can only change themselves for the better by changing their behavior (and not by waiting, taking pills or expecting any other external help), explore is a well applicable tool. And then it becomes socially relevant.

Please send me your perspective on socially relevant technology – would love to discuss!

The post Socially Relevant Technology appeared first on DATARELLA.

Das bedeutet einen klaren Wechsel der Machtpositionen: von Kliniken, Laboren und Ärzten bewegt sich die Fähigkeit der Gesundheitsüberwachung hin zum Menschen und Patienten: er gewinnt – er ist ab sofort selbst in der Lage, seine Gesundheit zu analysieren und relevante Signale hin entsprechend zu handeln.

The post Monitor Me – Wie Quantified Self das Gesundheitswesen revolutioniert appeared first on DATARELLA.

Wer sein Verhalten konsequent täglich misst, sammelt eine große Menge an Daten an, die es zu analysieren gilt. Apps wie Up oder Nike+ Fuelband bereiten die Daten in ansprechenden., gut lesbaren Graphiken auf, die dem Nutzer einen schnellen Überblick seines Verhaltens erlauben. Inwiefern helfen die gesammelten Daten und ihre Aufbereitung aber nun wirklich? Sehen wir uns lediglich die schönen Charts an oder ändern wir basierend auf neuen Erkenntnissen unsere Lebensweise? Und – wie genau messen diese Apps wirklich? Können wir uns auf die Ergebnisse verlasen, so dass eine Verhaltensänderung auch den richtigen Schritt bedeutet?

Apps wie Human oder Moves motivieren ihre Nutzer dazu, sich über einen bestimmten Zeitraum pro Tag zu bewegen. Es sind simple Apps, die nur ein Ziel haben: mehr Bewegung ihrer Nutzer. Und weil jede zusätzliche Komplexität im mit Terminen, Verpflichtungen und mentalen Anforderungen angefüllten Tagesablauf störend wirken würde, verzichten die Apps auf Funktionalität: man wird aufgefordert, sich 30 Minuten pro Tag zu bewegen – sonst nichts. Diese Einfachheit ist der erste wichtige Grund dafür, wie Big Data ein Teil unseres Lebens wird: indem man sich nicht darum kümmern muss, sorgen Apps und tragbare Geräte dafür, dass wir automatisch und nebenbei die für uns wichtigen Daten sammeln.

Heute und auch noch ein paar Jahre in die Zukunft gedacht, nutzen wir die sogenannten wearable devices – tragbare Geräte wie beispielsweise den Withings Pulse. Der Gesamtmarkt für wearable device wird auf etwa 300 Millionen verkaufte Geräte im Jahr 2017 geschätzt. Im nächsten Schritt werden externe Zusatzgeräte wie der Pulse vermutlich von Implantaten und invasiven Arzneimitteln ersetzt: Wie sollte man den eigenen Körper besser kennenlernen, als durch den Blick ins Innere? Körpertemperatur, Puls, Atemfrequenz, der Hormonhaushalt und sogar eingenommene Medikamente können automatisch jederzeit gemessen und kontrolliert werden. Nicht nur für die Optimierung des persönlichen Wohlergehens, sondern auch für die Früherkennung und Prävention von Krankheiten kann dies von unermesslichem Wert sein.

Neben den klar erkennbaren Vorteilen des Quantified Self lasen sich auch potentielle Gefahren erkennen: was passiert, wenn die gemessenen Daten gegen die messende Person verwendet werden? Was, wenn die Daten in unbefugte Hände gelangen? Diese Fragen deuten auf reale Gefahren hin und müssen beantwortet werden. Die Tatsache, dass die komplette und ständige Vermessung des menschlichen Körpers in kurzer Zeit Realität sein wird und die daraus entstehenden Vorteile für Millionen von kranken und gefährdeten Menschen lebensrettend sein können, macht deutlich, wie wichtig dies für den Menschen ist und dass Quantified Self als ein selbstverständlicher Aspekt jeden verantwortungsbewussten Verhaltens angesehen werden wird.

The post Wie mit Quantified Self Big Data ein Teil unseres Lebens wird appeared first on DATARELLA.