An experiment of Quantified Self: the life logging of David Achkar

The experiment:

I present here the experiment of David Achkar.

David's blog

David's Twitter account

He is an influent blogger about Quantified Self.

He decided to track every waking minute of his days to know how he really spent his time. For that purpose, he used a simple Google calendar with a color code.

David's activities

Then, he gathered and studied the data and found out surprising things.
I think this experiment is very interesting because we can see how Quantified Self can highlight our cognitive biases. Besides, the majority of David’s discovering are representative of our life.

What David learned with the data:

Thanks to this experiment, David has been able to have data to answer the simple question “What have I 

done this day/week/month?”  And, he found out that his intuition was often misleading.

For instance, productive hours of work were often overestimated whereas less wanted activities like 

procrastinating were underestimated.

His set of data enabled him to build a “manufactured awareness” to be more aware of his time and better choose his activity.

The urgent and the important:

Distractions...

Paradoxically, recording his activities on his smartphone or computer throughout the day enabled David to stand
back and change his viewpoint on the use of the Internet and more generally of technology.

He found out that, very often, the urgent activities like answering an email, doing research for this email, arriving on 

facebook, talking with a friend on the chat were perceived by him as important at the moment. But, some of them 

were not. Therefore, thanks to his experiment, he got the proof with his data that switching too often from one 

activity to another was a huge waste of time.

I think that is something we all know but, seeing the figures about it can be more helpful to change it.

The Quantified Baby

The "Quantified Baby" trend

New data about babies

In the article “Is Quantified Self really new ?”, we have seen that what was really new in this trend was the idea that everybody can store and study quantitative data about themselves.

But, for instance, athletes have always done it to improve their preparations. 

Besides, parents are generally following their newborns with a lot of quantitative data. For instance, babies are weighed and measured very frequently after their births and even before, during the pregnancy.

Their sicknesses, their vaccines, their reactions to them are recorded in a 

health record book.

So, even before today, we could see that Quantified Self has been applied to babies.

That is why, now, the “Quantified Baby” is a very dynamic topic of innovation. Indeed, parents are already prepared to store data about their child for themselves and for their pediatrician.

So, there is a need to make  the storage of data easier. For instance, smart baby scales can create weight and height curves by themselves .

But, other innovations go beyond this and enable parents to have access to richer data about their child.

For instance, there are some wristbands made especially for kids. Like those for adults, they monitor activity levels and sleep patterns but they also alert parents whenever the child goes out of range. Thanks to a smartphone application, parents can follow  real-time data about their children.

The Sync : a wristband for babies

Another fascinating new thing is a smart feeding bottle – Sleevily -  that tracks how much and when your baby eat. 

Sleevily : the smart feeding bottle

And, last but not least, nervous parents can also measure their baby’s health vitals thanks to Teddy The Guardian, a new kind of Teddy bear.

“Teddy the Guardian is a plush bear with embedded certified medical sensors that measure child’s heart rate, oxygen saturation, and body temperature seamlessly during the play, capture and send the data using wireless technologies to pediatrician’s app. Every time a child takes Teddy The Guardian by the hand or puts Teddy’s paw on his forehead sensors detect the values, capture them and transmit in real time to a mobile app where data is analyzed, visualized, managed and downloaded by the medical staff and parents.”

The iPhone application of Teddy the Guardian

Pro and cons

Although this trend seems to be very helpful for young parents, it also has its detractors. Indeed, the “Quantified Baby” trend is blamed for overwhelming parents with data. And, it could distract them from learning to listen to natural cues and cycles.

Besides, we could also say the same about the whole Quantified Self trend. If the data we store and on which we are focused is not relevant, not only is it a waste of time but it also can prevent us from thinking about the right causes.

Is Quantified Self really new ?

Quantified Self or the Diary 2.0

Indeed, we could even say that the main idea of Quantified Self is to record data about yourself like writing in a journal.
Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, famously tracked 13 personal virtues in a daily journal to push himself toward moral perfection. He shared this insight in his autobiography: “I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined, but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”
Besides, the idea of measuring things to highlight progress towards a goal is commonplace in large organizations. Governments tot up trade figures, hospital waiting times and exam results; companies measure their turnover, profits and inventory. 
But the use of metrics by individuals is rather less widespread. Nevertheless, we could think of the athletes who take into account many parameters like food, sleep in their preparation.
So, what is really new is Quantified Self today is the idea that everybody can store quantitative data about themselves to achieve their goals.

The innovations of the Quantified Self are based of innovation in connected objects

The smart body analyzer of Withings

Indeed, today, Quantified Self is among the hottest topics in innovation. Some of the most successful startups of the moment belong to this trend. For instance, we could think of the French startup Withings, very famous for its smart body analyzer with measures of weight, body composition, heart rate and air quality. The company has just released its new product: a watch that is as beautiful as normal watches but also able to 
monitor your activity.

The keys of Quantified Self : Big Data, Data storage, Data processing and Sensors

More precisely, the innovation in data storage and processing is crucial for Quantified Self in order to store, process and highlight information. For instance, let's say you use a wristband with an accelerometer, the amount of data you create in one day is huge. Yesterday's computers and phones could not treat it.
Besides, another aspect of the innovation in the connected objects of Quantified Self is based on the improvement in sensors. Sensors enable devices to get a variety of data like your speed, your heart rate etc. Sensors are much cheaper and smaller that before.

Quantified Self

What is Quantifed Self ?

Some of the aspects of Quantified Self

Self-Quantifying or Self-Tracking or Body Hacking is a quite recent movement based on the idea that the storage and the study of every aspect of a person's daily life are able to bring better self-knowledge and help for improvement.

The kind of data in which self-quantifiers are interested is extremely diverse.

The best-known applications of Quantified Self have included tracking physical activity, calorie intake and sleep quality and quantity.

For instance, if you are interested in improving your training for a marathon, you can track your performance when you run by providing data collected with your smartphone or with a device like a wristband to an application. Then, you can learn very useful things on the application’s dashboard. For instance, it can highlight that you are running much better if you have slept enough the days before your run. Or, it can also indicate your weaknesses to work on (e.g. you can have to work on your sprint performances to be better for long distances)..

The californian Fitbit wristband to track physical activity

Quantified Self also aims at tracking many others aspects of everyday life like the quality of surrounding air, your mood or also your blood oxygen level.

Another application of Quantified Self is among people with a chronic disease. Quantified Self can help them to better understand the factors that are bad for them. For instance, some asthma inhalers contain a GPS tracker. Thank to the geolocalisation, it enables a user to discover his or her vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. For instance, the user can learn that some trees are very dangerous for her because her inhaler would have highlighted that she often needs to use it when this kind of trees are around.

Besides, still among people with a chronic disease, Quantified Self enables the users to keep track of symptoms, treatments and reactions to treatment for hundreds of conditions. Then, people can better understand what works for them and also share information with people with the same disease. This phenomenon has created huge databases that can provide precious data both for doctors or patients. However, the data collected individually may be less reliable than those of a pharmaceutical field test. But, as Quantified Self aficionados use different devices (like their phones, some smart wristbands, etc.) these databases are much richer.

Why this can help ?

Quantified Self can help people in different ways.

First, it can provide you new data thanks to sensors.

It can also uncover patterns in peoples’ habits.

Some of the patterns can be more or less obvious. For instance, as far as sleep is concerned, the dashboard can teach you that alcohol or caffeine are quite bad for a good night of sleep. But, to begin with, seeing it can be more powerful that just knowing barely it. Besides, the information can be much more precise. For instance, your device can show you that coffee after 4:30 pm is quite bad for your sleep.

Furthermore, it can free people from cognitive biases like in the estimation of calorie intake for instance. Indeed, studies show that the fatter someone is the more he underestimates the calorie intake in a meal. So, these kinds of application can help people to lose weight.

Besides, tracking your progress can be a good source of motivation. 

MyfitnessPal : an application to track food and physical activity with a social aspect

The social aspect of Quantified Self

By making it possible to share data on specialized websites, Quantified Self creates communities of people with the same interests.

At the beginning, the early adopters of Quantified Self were tech obsessed yuppies of the West Coast but, now, 69% of Americans track at least one aspect of their life. So, it is a very significant trend.