CubeSensors

Available "Summer 2013," CubeSensors are "small, cordless and connected devices that continuously measure temperature, humidity, noise, light, air quality and barometric pressure."

See TechCrunch for a nice article about them and another article about competitor Lapka. 

Techonomy2012 Bell Interview by David Kirkpatrick

David does an on stage interview while I note that my heart rate increases while we talk about lifelogging and the Quantitative Self movement. See it

http://techonomy.com/2012/11/gordon-bell-at-techonomy-2012-the-uploaded-life-paramemory-and-information-magnetism/

How Memory Works: 10 Things Most People Get Wrong

See the article in PsyBlog

http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/10/how-memory-works-10-things-most-people-get-wrong.php

This is an intersting and stimulating article when viewed against our belief that users will have a lifetime external store for everything, thus changing the load and function of memory. The article is devoid of the fact that electronic memories are really taking over many of the jobs that would have been done by people with amazing memories e.g. librarians.

Here are the 10--

1. Memory does not decay

2. Forgetting helps you learn (for organizing more recent stuff)

3. 'Lost' memories can live again

4. Recalling memories alters them

5. Memory is unstable

6. The foresight bias

7. When recall is easy, learning is low

9. Memory, reloaded

8. Learning depends heavily on context

10. Learning is under your control

Personal Health Tracking: Devices & Experience in Quantified Self (QS) Lifelogging

I'm one of the several thousand organized in about 100 meetup groups who are quantifying there selves, mostly for non-narcissist, self health and wellness benefit, for an overview, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self.  As part of this a number of physicians have created groups who are willing to track to understand various anonomolies e.g. diabetes, heart disease.

As a trackee with a SF physican managed by his quantifying coach, my goal is to understand the behavior of my heart, having had two (heart attacks, bypasses, and pacemakers). In doing this, I hope to understand the conditions for the onset of angina pain at various times when I exert myself too rapidly.

Here are the devices I use and parameters tracked in m first two weeks, ended 1 November 2012:

1. BodyTrack site operated at Carnegie Mellon University Bodytrack.org that holds my data from various other sites. This provides many tracks that I use to impute cause and effect. Download for free, coupling it to BodyMedia, Zeo, and Mymee
2. BodyMedia armband that captures energy expenditure via heatfux, steps, lying/sleeping, plus manual entry of other parameters that you pay to upload. This is a must have device.
3. Fitbit provides a useful approximation to BodyMedia but at no monthly cost.
4. Zeo sleep tracker (I have one, but am not bothering with it since BodyMedia captures sleep
5. SweetWaterHRV http://www.sweetwaterhrv.com/index.shtml aka SweetBeat heart rate variability (HRV). Requires iStuff (not Mac on tiny iPods)  Intersting stress metric--so just try it.
6. Mymee -- a tool that allows manual entry of particular data about my exercises that BodyTrack plots: weight, food input, exercise (walk, swim, row), angina pain level, shortness of breath, HRV, and overall daily.
7. Other metrics or monitors that may be useful: weight, blood pressure, lung capacity (spirometer), consumer oriented 24 x 7 heart rate monitor aka Holter monitor,  glucose

What I have learned about my heart in conjunction with my doctors:

1. Its complicated
2. Skipping a day of Lipitor and other medication does affect me. Maybe missing beta blockers does, but I need to run an experiment.
3. Exercise is more important than I thought--its critical. E.g. after one terrble day with pain, ending with swimming, the next 5 days starting with a record breaking swim were pain free. Conclusion I have to exercise every day.  Swimming is best for me because of the constant, forced, breathing regime.
4. NOT SO FAST. After those 5 great days, the next couple of days I had angina pains. Was it a warmer day, or is it lung overload, the phlegm coming from pollen or what?
5. My Sydney doctor says I can skip one day a week--she also told me to always walk with nitro--something that I don't want to admit to because it is just one step closer to EOL.
6. Conclusions: Exercise 6 days a week, use something to reduce or eliminate anything that could be affecting breathing (Lung Flute helps), and check the weather (cold weather in SF is heavy, causes a breathing problem as does, humidity etc.) and then there's diet and digestion .
7. My heart seems to be on that knife edge that can go either way when weather, sleep, exercise history, diet, etc. tips the balance.
8. Its complicated

Lifelogging Taxonomy: Extreme lifelogging by 2020

I'm fond of building taxonomies to aid understanding where a field or things are and where progress is likely to lead.  The need to define "extreme lifelogging" came up in the summer of 2009 when speaking to the New Scientist. I claim that everyone with a computer isdoing lifelogging to some degree, creating memories--provided they aren't deleting.   I then claimed that in 10 years, continuous life recording of everything being seen would be common in 2020 --this is extreme lifelogging

Since we started using or wearing SenseCams in 2003, when someone sees me for the first time, they invariably ask: "Where's the camera that's recording everything?"  Thus the discussion in 2009 prompted the definition of the recording of everything we ever see as Extreme Lifelogging (almost).  When we also capture sound i.e. conversations, it is even more extreme. 

In defining extreme lifelogging it is critical to show the various degrees and facets of capturing everything aka lifelogging. 

So hear's verson 0.9 of a taxonomy... in some sense ordered by degree:

•Implicit, light lifelogging–store and retain everything your computer has seen for record keeping, recall

•Professional lifelogging --maintaince of corporate and personal communication and records, etc.

•Lifelong learned logging retention of books, magazines and journals read, courses taken

•Personal and Family lifelogging

•Social lifelogging communication, ideas, etc. are spread everywhere e.g. FB, LinkedIn, Yammer

•Health-Wellness lifelogging. Quantitative Self Movement is aimed at constant tracking of health bits

•Transcribing all notes from conversations & thoughts lifelogging - Thad Starner c1983-

Extreme lifelogging everything you see and hear. 
–Lifelog Tracks aka lifetrack aka lifetrek

•After-life Lifelogging  Only your avatar knows. TBD

•Institutional lifelogging  e.g. LoC, British Library

•Property lifelogging… a catalog of life's stuff