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/

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

PASIG (Personal Archiving SIG) Talk (Video) Austin, TX 1/13/12

My keynote was taped  and edited.  The focus was on the role of academic institutions to maintain the lives of scholars in the 21st Century.  It lasted an hour including 10 min Q&A. View it here. https://lib.stanford.edu/files/pasig-jan2012/13G1%20Bell,%20PASIG,%20Austin%202012-01-13.pdf

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Facebook gets into lifelogging with their timeline feature

CNN coverage:

With 'real-time' apps, Facebook is always watching

(CNN) -- A couple years ago, a Microsoft researcher named Gordon Bell embarked on a personal experiment: He would wear a video camera around his neck all the time and keep this "life recorder" always turned on, so it would record everything he did.

It was like an external memory drive for his brain, he wrote in a book called "Total Recall."

Sounds pretty sci-fi, right? Not so much. The "real-time sharing" updates Facebook announced Thursday aim to do something quite similar -- only for the Internet instead of in real life.

 With 'Timeline' feature, Facebook goes eternal (or at least tries to)

"Timeline is the story of your life," Zuckerberg said.

Introducing ERLY.com: Organizing your life(logging) experiences

Just got a note from Eric Feng, the founder of Erly.com announcing their first product based on organizating Collections of one's lifelogs e.g. photos, videos, notes nto wonderful productions. Eric was an entrepeneur in residence at Kliener Perkins Caufield and Byers, and KPCB is an investor.

Check out their blog (http://blog.erly.com) for more info about Erly as well as an intro video about Collections, their first product. Or go to http://erly.com and give it a try. The team sollicits your feedback.

The concept and organization of the the Erly system corresponds to several Total Recall concepts: structuing one's life into segments of autobiographical memory, organizing content into collections, and providing various visualizations to display stories. Friends can add content and life segments can be uploaded to the social media sites.