Lifelogging

Lifelogging is the process of tracking personal data generated by our own behavioral activities. While Lifestreaming primarily tracks the activity of content we create and discover, Lifelogging tracks personal activity data like exercising, sleeping, and eating. This may sound a bit confusing but hopefully the distinction between the two makes sense. The Quantified Self movement takes the aspect of simply tracking the raw data to try and draw correlations and ways to improve our lives from it. You can read more about this on my post here.

I created this page to track some of the devices, apps, and web services that are being created to allow us to Lifelog. You can also view an archive of all my posts on Lifelogging here. For a comprehensive list of Lifelogging apps, devices and services visit the official Quantified Self guide to self tracking.

Product Directories

Guides, Tips, and News

Gadgets & Sensors

  • Amiigo – Wristband and shoe sensor that work together to track personal activity with the ability to differentiate between types of activities
  • Autographer – A high-end wearable camera for lifelogging
  • Automatic – Tracks your driving and helps you make small changes in your driving habits based on the data
  • Basis – Stylish device that looks like a watch and tracks workouts, heart-rate, and sleep and provides on online health dashboard
  • Beddit – Sleep tracking device
  • Bedscales – track sleep and weight in one device
  • BodyMedia FIT – Armband to track physical activity and sleep patterns. Tracking is done by iPhone or Android apps as well as a web service. [my review]
  • CarePredict – An activity tracker to help empower seniors who want to live at home
  • Cubesensors – Indoor environment monitoring sensor
  • Fitbit – Tracks fitness and sleep activity data
  • Green Goose – Wireless sensors that can be attached to other items to measure activity
  • HAPIfork – A device to track and analyze your eating to help you reduce your pace.
  • iHealth – Multiple health and fitness devices
  • Jawbone Up – Wristband sensor to track physical activity and sleep
  • Lark – Wristband to track physical activity and sleep with software to also track eating and encourage activity
  • Looxcie – Small behind the ear wearable camera to passively record in first person
  • Lumoback – Device to track posture and help you improve it
  • Med Gadget – Personal Activity Monitor to Interface with Sprint Phones
  • Metromile – Driving analytics device
  • Misfit Shine – Activity tracker made of aluminum that is waterproof and provides wireless sync
  • Memoto – Affordable lifelogging camera with apps for iOS and Android
  • Moov – An activity tracker with some unique functionality to track multiple activities
  • Muse – Brain sensing headband
  • Nike + Nike Fuelband, Nike+ running app, shoes with sensors, and Xbox Kinect software that allow you to track physical activities.
  • Sano Intelligence – A small wearable sensor to capture real-time blood chemistry
  • Sensoria Smart Sock – Designed to more accurately track running activity
  • Trace – A fitness tracker for action sports like surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding
  • Vicon Revue – Passive camera that takes snapshots based on Microsoft SenseCam pioneered by Gordon Bell
  • W/ME – A  wristband which provides insight towards our mental state & agility.
  • WakeMate – Records sleep activity data
  • Withings – Wifi body scale & blood pressure monitor. Tracks data and has iOS & Android apps
  • Zendrive – Capture data about your driving habits to improve them.
  • Zeo – Tracks sleep activity data

Apps

  • Argus – Tracks data across multiple activity tracking devices and services to provide insights
  • Average Sleep – Calculate your average night of sleep if you have a Zeo with this app
  • Bodywise – Track over 40 areas of your health and fitness to improve your wellbeing
  • Cardiio – Touch free heart rate monitor
  • Digifit – Track all your workouts
  • Daytum – Manually record and organize any type of daily activities
  • Endomondo – Track workouts, challenge friends, and analyze the resulting data
  • Eventflow – A digital life recorder (Android)
  • Everyday – Take a photo of yourself every day and publish to other sites and create a personal slideshow
  • Ginger.io – A behavioral analytics platform that turns mobile data into health insights
  • Heyday – Automatic personal journal based on your photos and location
  • In Flow – Aims to help you to better understand yourself and your ever-changing mood
  • Instant – Track several different types of personal data along with app usage and more
  • Instant Heart Rate – Track heartrate simply by using your finger
  • ITrackMyTime – Visualize your daily activities
  • Kennedy – Automatic journaling / lifelogging app (iOS only)
  • Lifelapse – Wearable pouch around the neck and app to passively use your iPhone to record video
  • Lume Personal Tracker – Track mood and energy
  • MapMyRun – A location tracking running app
  • Moodpanda – Track Mood daily
  • Mealsnap – Take a photo of the meal you eat, and then get an estimate of how many calories your meal was
  • Momento – An app that will aggregate data across multiple services into a calendar view and let you manually record your own diary as well
  • Moves – A nice simple and visual app for activity tracking that uses the accelerometer built into your phone
  • Mymee – Easily log and track many vitals for health to learn what triggers various issues
  • One Second Everyday – Create a video timeline by recording one second every day
  • OptimizeMe – Record, analyze and optimize your life based on logged data. Works with Moves app as well.
  • Quotidian – Software to visualize time and events
  • Quentiq – An app & service to track fitness activities from several devices as well as manually entered that takes the data to calculate a “health score”
  • Reporter – A very elegant and visually beautiful app for lifelogging by Nicolas Felton
  • Rseven – Records all mobile activity (sms, mms, calls, photos, video, etc.) to a calendar display
  • RunKeeper – Tracks running activity data
  • Saga – Lifelogging app for iOS and Android that captures quite a bit of your activity passively using your phone’s built-in sensors.
  • Shadow – Track and remember dreams
  • Sleep bot – A truly simple way to track and improve your sleep
  • Sleep Genius – Sleep algorithms and scientifically composed music ease your brain into its natural sleep rhythms
  • Sleep Cycle – Tracks sleep activity data
  • Sleep Time – Tracks your sleeping
  • Stress Check – Determines stress level by monitoring heart rate
  • Tableau Public – Software that can take raw data and create extremely nice interactive visualizations that you can publish on the web
  • Tonic Self Care Assistant – Remember and track all health and wellness activities
  • Weight Record – Track your weight and other metrics
  • Whatpulse – measures your keyboard/mouse usage, down- & uploads and your uptime. It sends these statistics here, to the website, where you can use these stats to analyze your computing life, compete against or with your friends and compare your statistics to other people.
  • Zen Log – iOS app to manually track personal metrics such as mood and sleep quality

Web Services

  • Beeminder – Create goals and then aggregate data from multiple activity trackers and services to track progress
  • Bedpost – A service to track and provide insight into your sex life
  • Everylog – Log anything you want and even setup a leaderboard to compete with friends
  • Exist – An aggregation service that connects to your personal data services to analyze and draw insights
  • HonestBaby – App to allow for child development tracking
  • Mercury App – Micro-journaling with analytics. Choose something to track daily with a rating
  • Microsoft HealthVault – organize, store, and share health information online
  • Moodscope – Track your mood daily and gain insights
  • RescueTime – Passively tracks computer usage activity
  • Sen.se – Track daily activities with your own metric definition. Many other filters and apps for the data available as well.
  • Slife – Similar to RescueTime by tracking computer usage activity
  • Traqs.me – Aggregate activity across multiple devices and access via visual dashboard and reports
  • uMotif – Track personal stats data and achieve goals in a simple and beautiful interface

Data Aggregation App, Services and API’s

Smart Journals

I wrote a primer on this new breed of apps, software and cloud services that let us create journals along with aggregating our personal data created on other services.

Health Services

  • Inside Tracker – Provides blood analysis with actionable data to improve your health
  • Ubiqu Health – Track migraines both on the web and mobile
  • WellnessFX – Get lab tests with detailed information about health data

Articles

Videos

  • Gordon Bell who developed the Lifelogging concept provides details on his MyLifeBits project – on Vimeo

Websites / Conferences

  • IndieWebCamp – A gathering of creators to further open web technologies for personal data
  • ISWC – International Symposium on Wearable Computers
  • Living by Numbers – Conference put on by Wired to learn how better data can lead us to better health
  • Open You – Provides news and resources about open source app for health devices
  • Personal Digital Archive Conference – PDA explores the intersections between individuals, public institutions, and private companies engaged in the creation, preservation, and ongoing use of the digital records of our daily lives.
  • Personal Data Ecosystem – A consortium for the ethical integration point for data from different sources
  • Quantified Self – A community of users collectively sharing and learning more about self-tracking / Lifelogging. Having their first conference in May 2011
  • Strata Conference – Not specific to Lifelogging but a conference about data that can crossover in several areas

64 Comments

  1. Were you to wander around Las Vegas this week you’d be in for a surprise – the usual office-weary conference goers have been replaced by the sparkling spectacle of technology replete with Silicon Valley hotshots, super-fast 3D printers and hovering drones.
    The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the largest electronics trade show in the world where many of the latest consumer gadgets get their first public outing. Wearable technologies are big this year: devices incorporating sensors that capture data from our bodies, such as movements, moods, sleeping patterns or heart rates.
    For gourmands there is the infinitely useful “smart belt” (which loosens or tightens with your waistline), for concerned parents there is the “smart pacifier”, Pacif-I, which allows you to monitor your baby’s temperature remotely with an app. And there is the Melomind, a headset that scans your brainwaves to select tunes customised to your mood.
    In addition to making our lives easier, wearables provide us with a means to get to know ourselves in greater detail. At least, that is the key message of the “quantified self movement”. According to one of the founders, Gary Wolf, self-quantification promises “self-knowledge through numbers”.
    Data Is Not Enlightenment
    This might sound nice, but we should not fool ourselves. This has nothing to do with the philosophical self-examination once proposed by Socrates. It is much more fatalistic.
    Take Chris Dancy, a quantified-self guru known as “the most connected human on earth”. In an interview he recalled how in 2008 he had been laid off with bleak prospects of finding a new job. To “rebuild himself for the future,” he turned to self-logging his data. According to Dancy, everyone has to go down the same path – he is just ahead of the curve.
    Should we regard life-logging as an attempt to better ourselves, adapted to market conditions? Perhaps wearables, personal data sharing, and a constant drive to improve ourselves is less about expressing our own individuality than meeting the expectations placed on us: to be connected, sociable, creative, hard-working. Precisely the things a job coach would recommend.
    This is the point we develop in our new book, The Wellness Syndrome. Self-actualisation – turning against imposed demands to find your true inner self – and the opposite, complying with those demands, have come together almost seamlessly. But this is strange.
    We can draw a historical parallel between today’s tech culture around San Francisco and the generation of spiritual self-actualisers that came to prominence in the region during the 1960s. With a dislike of authority, these people rebelled against the prevailing cultural norms of their time. At places such as the Esalen Institute they could learn how to get rid of paternal figures by taking the “hot-seat”. Typically this meant placing an imagined father figure on the chair, verbally abusing him for a while, then experiencing a sense of relief from having pushed the father aside. The purpose of the workshop was to liberate yourself by taking ownership of your life.
    Today’s wearable enthusiasts don’t put an imaginary father figure on the hot seat, they sit on it themselves. The exercise doesn’t last for only a few hours; instead it goes on every single hour of the day with constant monitoring using wearable devices.

    Constantly on the go. Jocey K, CC BY-SA

     
    In this work context, where wearables are becoming increasingly popular, it evokes a return to the productivity theory and Scientific Management of Fredrick Winslow Taylor – but with a twist. The writer Nikil Saval has claimed that the rise of self-quantification has revived “Taylor’s dream of pure efficiency”. This time, however, the stop-watch is not confined to the factory floor, but keeps ticking at all moments of life, even during our sleep. Even when “liberated from threats or coercion”, Saval says, “we scientifically manage ourselves”.
    Unsocial Media
    This trend can have devastating consequences. Wearable users can become obsessed with checking on themselves – we already know that the average smartphone user checks their device an average of 150 times a day. Once a user has information about their own bodily functions, this compulsive checking is likely to intensify.
    In the film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s hands continue to twitch after he leaves work in the factory. Today, heavy users of smartwatches have been found to develop a “phantom watch” effect, constantly checking their bare wrists even when not wearing the gadget.
    What sets wearables apart from other forms of social media is that, instead of reaching out to the world through messaging, emails, and social networks, we start to turn inwards, self-reflexively checking our steps, calorie intake, heart rate, or moods. As we become more obsessed with our own personal “dashboard”, we are not necessarily gaining more insights about ourselves. Constantly seeking to improve our data might have unfortunate social consequences.
    What would happen if we started to spend time exclusively with those who could help us juice up our happiness rating? Is what’s good for our happiness index good for our social life? Rather than gaining self-knowledge, we run the risk of becoming self-delusional. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but there’s reason to fear that wearables will make people even more isolated.

    Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/wearable-tech-could-turn-us-navel-gazing-slaves-smartwatch

    Sur le même thème

  28. […] in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. He is a leading researcher in the field of “Lifelogging” and is actively developing search and organization technologies for big-data archives of […]

  29. […] Watch. He even had a Google Glass with him! This brought him to the discussion of a concept called lifelogging. Lifelogging enables the concept of a surrogate memory and lifeloggers are those people  who wear […]

  36. Quantified Self Videos
    The Quantified Self: How Wearable Sensors Expand Human Potential
    Giving Emotional Meaning to the Quantified Self
    Quantified Self Blogs
    Quantified Self
    The Daily Beast
    Pixel Health
    Lifestream Blog
    Reddit: Quantified Self
    Quantified Device Guides
    The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self (Plus, a List of the Best Personal Data Tools Out There)
    Quantified Self Gadget Guide
    Quantified Self Tracking Tools
     The Ultimate Guide To The 50+ Hottest Health And Fitness Apps, Gadgets And Startups Of The Year
    © Beese-Bjurstrom, 2014.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Shawna Beese-Bjurstrom, RN, MBA with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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    Related

  37. Wearable Tech Could Turn Us Into Navel-Gazing Slaves To The Smartwatch

    February 20, 2015 Media, smartwatch, Technology

    (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

    Were you to wander around Las Vegas this week you’d be in for a surprise – the usual office-weary conference goers have been replaced by the sparkling spectacle of technology replete with Silicon Valley hotshots, super-fast 3D printers and hovering drones.
    The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the largest electronics trade show in the world where many of the latest consumer gadgets get their first public outing. Wearable technologies are big this year: devices incorporating sensors that capture data from our bodies, such as movements, moods, sleeping patterns or heart rates.
    For gourmands there is the infinitely useful “smart belt” (which loosens or tightens with your waistline), for concerned parents there is the “smart pacifier”, Pacif-I, which allows you to monitor your baby’s temperature remotely with an app. And there is the Melomind, a headset that scans your brainwaves to select tunes customised to your mood.
    In addition to making our lives easier, wearables provide us with a means to get to know ourselves in greater detail. At least, that is the key message of the “quantified self movement”. According to one of the founders, Gary Wolf, self-quantification promises “self-knowledge through numbers”.
    Data Is Not Enlightenment
    This might sound nice, but we should not fool ourselves. This has nothing to do with the philosophical self-examination once proposed by Socrates. It is much more fatalistic.
    Take Chris Dancy, a quantified-self guru known as “the most connected human on earth”. In an interview he recalled how in 2008 he had been laid off with bleak prospects of finding a new job. To “rebuild himself for the future,” he turned to self-logging his data. According to Dancy, everyone has to go down the same path – he is just ahead of the curve.
    Should we regard life-logging as an attempt to better ourselves, adapted to market conditions? Perhaps wearables, personal data sharing, and a constant drive to improve ourselves is less about expressing our own individuality than meeting the expectations placed on us: to be connected, sociable, creative, hard-working. Precisely the things a job coach would recommend.
    This is the point we develop in our new book, The Wellness Syndrome. Self-actualisation – turning against imposed demands to find your true inner self – and the opposite, complying with those demands, have come together almost seamlessly. But this is strange.
    We can draw a historical parallel between today’s tech culture around San Francisco and the generation of spiritual self-actualisers that came to prominence in the region during the 1960s. With a dislike of authority, these people rebelled against the prevailing cultural norms of their time. At places such as the Esalen Institute they could learn how to get rid of paternal figures by taking the “hot-seat”. Typically this meant placing an imagined father figure on the chair, verbally abusing him for a while, then experiencing a sense of relief from having pushed the father aside. The purpose of the workshop was to liberate yourself by taking ownership of your life.
    Today’s wearable enthusiasts don’t put an imaginary father figure on the hot seat, they sit on it themselves. The exercise doesn’t last for only a few hours; instead it goes on every single hour of the day with constant monitoring using wearable devices.

    Constantly on the go. Jocey K, CC BY-SA

    In this work context, where wearables are becoming increasingly popular, it evokes a return to the productivity theory and Scientific Management of Fredrick Winslow Taylor – but with a twist. The writer Nikil Saval has claimed that the rise of self-quantification has revived “Taylor’s dream of pure efficiency”. This time, however, the stop-watch is not confined to the factory floor, but keeps ticking at all moments of life, even during our sleep. Even when “liberated from threats or coercion”, Saval says, “we scientifically manage ourselves”.
    Unsocial Media
    This trend can have devastating consequences. Wearable users can become obsessed with checking on themselves – we already know that the average smartphone user checks their device an average of 150 times a day. Once a user has information about their own bodily functions, this compulsive checking is likely to intensify.
    In the film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s hands continue to twitch after he leaves work in the factory. Today, heavy users of smartwatches have been found to develop a “phantom watch” effect, constantly checking their bare wrists even when not wearing the gadget.
    What sets wearables apart from other forms of social media is that, instead of reaching out to the world through messaging, emails, and social networks, we start to turn inwards, self-reflexively checking our steps, calorie intake, heart rate, or moods. As we become more obsessed with our own personal “dashboard”, we are not necessarily gaining more insights about ourselves. Constantly seeking to improve our data might have unfortunate social consequences.
    What would happen if we started to spend time exclusively with those who could help us juice up our happiness rating? Is what’s good for our happiness index good for our social life? Rather than gaining self-knowledge, we run the risk of becoming self-delusional. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but there’s reason to fear that wearables will make people even more isolated.

    Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/wearable-tech-could-turn-us-navel-gazing-slaves-smartwatch

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  38. What is lifelogging? Well Lifestream Blog puts it into perspective by saying “Lifelogging is the process of tracking personal data generated by our own behavioral activities.”
    As technology moves forward our obsession for it moves forward as well so it doesn’t surprise me how popular it is becoming. These tools or gadgets come in many different forms from web services such as Daytum, to gadgets and sensors such as google glasses and fitness tracking watches, to mobile apps that count steps or can track sleep patterns.
    Photo by Handbag.com (License CC 3.0)
    Am I worried about life-logging? Leaving a trail of my life online?
    I have never really thought about it. When I do think about it, nothing comes to mind because I don’t use any life-logging or quantified self tools, except for maybe Facebook if you can count that as one. It seems like it is the only ‘life-logging’ tool I use because of the way it saves your activity. I can go back and check posts I have made and commented on from when I first signed up in 2011 and it is very easy to see the difference.
    I decided to track my life-logging for a day to see how much I really logged. Not that I was overly concerned just thought it would be an interesting idea, even though I can basically only track it with Facebook, which makes this similar to the logging I used for my Identity Map. Anyway here is a donut graph of my time spent logging for the day (which is really boring).

    See! Boring…. Because I don’t use any gadgets or have any apps on my phone that can be classified as a ‘life-logging’ tool I have had to base this off of social media, which, in a way is a form of life-logging and the only one that I use.
    I guess in a way life-logging is like keeping an online journal of self data from your own behavioural activities, whether it is through commenting or posting on Facebook or using an app from the app store that will track how many steps you take a day and give you goals to break, or an app that tracks each night of your sleeping so you can track a sleeping pattern. Is this a good thing? I think yes, but in a way no. Yes because the forward motion of technology makes it easier and easier to live each day by basically giving us many of what used to be a challenge or a hassle on a plate. But no because I think there is a lot of privacy and ethical problems that people will find without giving it any second thought.
    Anyway, if you have read this blog and you’re thinking you just jump right into some self quantified activities straight away, Daytum is a cool website you can look into to begin with where you can log data each day to keep a track of it and share with others.
    Lifestream Blog (2015) Lifelogging/Quantified Self, Available at:http://lifestreamblog.com/lifelogging/ (Accessed: 23rd April 2015).
    Share this:TwitterFacebookGoogleLike this:Like Loading…

  39. Min kollega Anne-Lie tipsade på sin Facebook-sida om ett blogginlägg Micke Kazarnowicz skrivit om tekniksamhället och dess inverkan/påverkan på oss människor. Blogginlägget var skrivet på en webbsajt som heter Memoto och när jag hade läst klart Mickes intressanta text började jag kika runt på bloggen.
    Snart insåg jag att bloggen är skyltfönstret för en ännu ej lanserad tjänst om life-logging och att man genom att lämna sin e-postadress kunde få mer information om tjänsten längre fram.
    Jag lämnade, som så många gånger förr, min e-post och tänkte att jag väl får ett mail om att köpa tjänsten om ett halvår eller så. Men icke. Redan samma dag fick jag ett mail med en personlig hälsning från Jenny på Memoto där hon berättade att hon skrivit upp mig på maillistan och undrade om jag ville berätta hur jag hittat till dem.
    Det var sex rader text. Men det var från en person, en människa, och det kändes uppriktigt. Och det var allt det tog för mig att bli ett fan av Memoto och berätta om bloggen och tjänsten på min Facebook och nu på mitt företags blogg. Om utfallet av mailet var värt jobbet det tog Jenny att maila mig? Det kan jag ju inte avgöra, men jag skulle gissa på att svaret är ja.
    Dela med dig!

    Du kanske också vill läsa:


    SVT intervjuar AddFriends om bloggmarknadsföring

    lifelogging, memoto, relationsmarknadsföring

  40. Wearable Tech Could Turn Us Into Navel-Gazing Slaves To The Smartwatch

    July 29, 2015 Media, smartwatch, Technology

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    Were you to wander around Las Vegas this week you’d be in for a surprise – the usual office-weary conference goers have been replaced by the sparkling spectacle of technology replete with Silicon Valley hotshots, super-fast 3D printers and hovering drones.
    The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the largest electronics trade show in the world where many of the latest consumer gadgets get their first public outing. Wearable technologies are big this year: devices incorporating sensors that capture data from our bodies, such as movements, moods, sleeping patterns or heart rates.
    For gourmands there is the infinitely useful “smart belt” (which loosens or tightens with your waistline), for concerned parents there is the “smart pacifier”, Pacif-I, which allows you to monitor your baby’s temperature remotely with an app. And there is the Melomind, a headset that scans your brainwaves to select tunes customised to your mood.
    In addition to making our lives easier, wearables provide us with a means to get to know ourselves in greater detail. At least, that is the key message of the “quantified self movement”. According to one of the founders, Gary Wolf, self-quantification promises “self-knowledge through numbers”.
    Data Is Not Enlightenment
    This might sound nice, but we should not fool ourselves. This has nothing to do with the philosophical self-examination once proposed by Socrates. It is much more fatalistic.
    Take Chris Dancy, a quantified-self guru known as “the most connected human on earth”. In an interview he recalled how in 2008 he had been laid off with bleak prospects of finding a new job. To “rebuild himself for the future,” he turned to self-logging his data. According to Dancy, everyone has to go down the same path – he is just ahead of the curve.
    Should we regard life-logging as an attempt to better ourselves, adapted to market conditions? Perhaps wearables, personal data sharing, and a constant drive to improve ourselves is less about expressing our own individuality than meeting the expectations placed on us: to be connected, sociable, creative, hard-working. Precisely the things a job coach would recommend.
    This is the point we develop in our new book, The Wellness Syndrome. Self-actualisation – turning against imposed demands to find your true inner self – and the opposite, complying with those demands, have come together almost seamlessly. But this is strange.
    We can draw a historical parallel between today’s tech culture around San Francisco and the generation of spiritual self-actualisers that came to prominence in the region during the 1960s. With a dislike of authority, these people rebelled against the prevailing cultural norms of their time. At places such as the Esalen Institute they could learn how to get rid of paternal figures by taking the “hot-seat”. Typically this meant placing an imagined father figure on the chair, verbally abusing him for a while, then experiencing a sense of relief from having pushed the father aside. The purpose of the workshop was to liberate yourself by taking ownership of your life.
    Today’s wearable enthusiasts don’t put an imaginary father figure on the hot seat, they sit on it themselves. The exercise doesn’t last for only a few hours; instead it goes on every single hour of the day with constant monitoring using wearable devices.

    Constantly on the go. Jocey K, CC BY-SA

    In this work context, where wearables are becoming increasingly popular, it evokes a return to the productivity theory and Scientific Management of Fredrick Winslow Taylor – but with a twist. The writer Nikil Saval has claimed that the rise of self-quantification has revived “Taylor’s dream of pure efficiency”. This time, however, the stop-watch is not confined to the factory floor, but keeps ticking at all moments of life, even during our sleep. Even when “liberated from threats or coercion”, Saval says, “we scientifically manage ourselves”.
    Unsocial Media
    This trend can have devastating consequences. Wearable users can become obsessed with checking on themselves – we already know that the average smartphone user checks their device an average of 150 times a day. Once a user has information about their own bodily functions, this compulsive checking is likely to intensify.
    In the film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s hands continue to twitch after he leaves work in the factory. Today, heavy users of smartwatches have been found to develop a “phantom watch” effect, constantly checking their bare wrists even when not wearing the gadget.
    What sets wearables apart from other forms of social media is that, instead of reaching out to the world through messaging, emails, and social networks, we start to turn inwards, self-reflexively checking our steps, calorie intake, heart rate, or moods. As we become more obsessed with our own personal “dashboard”, we are not necessarily gaining more insights about ourselves. Constantly seeking to improve our data might have unfortunate social consequences.
    What would happen if we started to spend time exclusively with those who could help us juice up our happiness rating? Is what’s good for our happiness index good for our social life? Rather than gaining self-knowledge, we run the risk of becoming self-delusional. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but there’s reason to fear that wearables will make people even more isolated.

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  43. Yes, as my friend Barbara Ganley teased me last week, today i did a fancy pants ****x (TEDx) talk here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was made possible by the incredibly generous/gracious Antonio Vantaggiato who invite me to speak at TEDx USagrado Corazón. The theme was “Think + Act”.
    More may be written about the event; this is the summary of my talk. It may be a few weeks before the video is added to the Big TEDx Channel in the Tube.
    It’s a re-shaping of the memorable/unmemorable talk I did in 2013 at UMW, similar in my path of looking at my school memories, but this one has a different focus. Because TEDx wants all images Creative Commons licensed, I had to toss all the scans of my old high school teachers, since yearbook photos are copyrighted.
    Below are the slides exported from the deck, and my notes. They only represent an approximation of what I said– I never use a script and frankly… I do not remember exactly what I said. There’s also extra references not in the talk.
    Here we go!

    We remember things, we forget. It seems simple. But is it?

    In the next 18… errrr 17½ minutes I will hope to make you think about your memories of school and then ponder if it has meaning we an act upon. When you look back on your years in school, you likely have vivid memories, teachers that made a difference. These stand out.
    But the question I have is what do the negative spaces, the blanks, in our memory tell us about how education happens?
    (this animated gif would not work in the theater projection system, BOO)We readily call the places computers store information as “memory”. Barring hardware failure or software malfunction, it effectively finds and stores information. But each one is stored at the same fidelity, and level of clarity.
    (ditto on remarks about GIFs)But our human memory does not work with such recall precision, they are not index able, information not always retrievable. Some memories are more vivid than others. It’s rather uneven. For me, I can easily zone in on many parts of my schooling that have vivid sensual impressions, even more than 40 years later. Memorable experiences and especially teachers, stand out. I grew curious about parts where I lack vivid memories. What is it about those periods that have left gaps in my memory? Why are they blank?

    This idea of a negative space – you may know the black and white example for demonstrating Figure-Ground perception– depending how you look at it, the image looks like a vase or two faces. Or it is the arrow created by the spaces between letters of the Fed-Ex logo.
    Or in this case, what forms the star? Do you see the star or do you see the thighs of of people wearing jeans? Do you see both? Is there a meaningful shape in the parts of my school memory arranged by the gaps in the more memorable ones?

    Indulge me as I walk a nostalgic timeline of my own educational experiences. This is the THINK. Think about yours.

    In 1970 at Bedford Elementary School, I sat in the second row, 2nw seat in, for Mrs. Foreman’s 2nd grade class. One day she returned a math quiz. She said that the class had done well, but only one student had earned a rather major distinction- a “check plus fantastic”.

    Every kid dismissed the idea it was them, but also lusted that it was. Now until this day, I thought of myself as just another kid. Yes, I liked to read, and liked going to school. I watched as she passed my desk and laid my math quiz upside down… I peeked… I was The One. Now this is a rather archaic form of motivation, a crude assessment. It’s out of fashion these days with educators trying to gauge weird things like “grit” or a “growth mindset“.
    But you know what? This check plus fantastic changed everything about school for me. I liked getting this reward. I wanted more. I wanted to learn more. I was motivated to do well in school.
    And this was pretty small. I am not sure Mrs Foreman saw her recognizing students as being life changing. And she probably had no idea about the effect her Check Plus Fantastic had on me.

    My fourth grade math teacher was Mr Fike. Mr Fike. Besides the gym teachers, the only male teacher at school. Kind of tall, with a scraggly beard. Not really huggable. But something he did made me turn on for math. Especially when we learned long division. It was magical. Maybe I was just a budding math geek. You had to look ahead, and plan for the next move. And you could divide any number, big or small, by any number, large or small.
    I can still do this.
    I could talk about many more teachers from Bedford. !st grade Mrs Berhnardt. My third grade teacher, Mrs Shapiro, stern, and who also taught my older sisters and all my cousins. Miss Piggot, Mrs Isaacson, Mrs Heck.
    But I want to move on to the first gap.

    Middle school, Sudbrook Junior High. I know I was there 2 years, and I have some creative writing papers and knew I took a special math program in 8th grade. I was on stage crew and ran the lights. But I cannot remember one teacher’s name nor can I visualize a classroom. This seems odd. All I can see is the hallway, the one I moved through quickly so I could avoid getting beat up. By the girls.

    High school was a lot different. No it did not look like this. Milford Mill was a typical red brick suburban Baltimore school. Miss Walker must have been a first year English teacher; in my freshman she taught us the structure of Western stories. One day we took a field field trip to see the a western at the movie theater. Our yellow school bus pulled up, and we saw that the movie was Star Wars. Star Wars? I thought we were going to see a Western. You are she said with a sly smile. Pay attention to the plot.
    Ironically I am planning a course in the spring of 2016 where I will teach story telling through westerns, including Star Wars.
    (By the way look closely at the slide, you will see a special character).

    Ahhh Mr Pitz. How did he ever survive school with that name? In stature he looked barely out of high school. He had pimples. We knew he was nerdy, but that was his charm. I had no idea of what pedagogy even was, but there we was having us do peer instruction by giving us a challenge to teach the rest of the class about non-Euclidian Geometry. He also seeded my interest in computer programming; we learned FORTRAN by coloring in punch cards and riding a bus once a week to the school in the district with an IBM mainframe.

    Crazy Blooma Friedman, my 10th grade Chemistry teacher. We learned about the Periodic Table, stoichiometry, She insisted we learn how to use a slide rule. She told stories of her date with author Leon Uris. But mostly I remember the method of dimensional analysis to convert units of things, a way you can convert miles per hour to light years per second. I used it in 2008, here as I was converting the price of gas in Iceland from krona per liter to dollars per gallon.

    Our tenth grade English teacher Miss Kirshman was strict and unrelenting in teaching us how to write essays. She pushed us hard, but she also opened our eyes to what was the electric words of Thoreau and Emerson. In fact, my core group of high school friends gathered around these writers; you could say we created a non-conformist group. My best friend from that time is still among my closet friends.

    My French teacher was Monsieur Rifkin. The only thing I remember from French is how to ask for the soup of the day. But he sparked an interest in Impressionistic art explaining more than technique and what it meant culturally.

    And Monsieur Rifkin was so appalled at out lack of understanding English, he took it on himself to teach us extra vocabulary, words that stuck.

    Perhaps the most inspirational teacher, Mt Witts made Calculus vital. Yeah, I was still a math nerd. He had regular challenges that were meaningful and relevant, not just book problems. He pushed us to think not just get answers to word problems He showed as a use for the concepts being taught, not just trying to get answers to match the key in the back of the book. We learned how Calculus could explain real world phenomena like acceleration and motion.

    The next black spot was first year of university. I entered the University of Delaware as a computer science major… and hated it. Programming seemed abstract and pointless. I cannot remember one computer science teacher, I cannot visualize even being in any classes here in Smith Hall.
    I do remember the computer room in the basement, the introduction of the first CRTs, and playing some sort of dungeon game on the mainframe, probably Zork.

    Everything changed when I switched majors that took my to this building, Penny Hall. I can remember just about every Geology teacher I took classes from in Penny Hall. I can tell you about field Trips with Dr Pizutto, the challenge of crystallography with Dr Leavens, or doing research on tektites with the appropriately named Dr Glass. I can see all of the small classrooms, the black table labs. I could talk about many of these teachers, but when I took this photo, I was visting the campus again in 2011, some 3 years after I was a student. I walked down the basement, saw the open door, and knocked it to say hello to Dr John Wehmiller.

    He looked up, an without much hesitation said, “Alan!”
    Dr Wehmiller was maybe not the best lecturer, he had the speaking habit of pausing with an “Oh”… but his Introduction to Geology class was the confirmation I needed to change my major from computer science. I was the kid in the front row of the class, sitting on the edge of my seat reading the whole textbook when only parts were required.
    And here is an important part of my message- it’s not just what the teacher does to make things memorable, the student’s presence, interest, and their own place in life are just as key an element. I was ready for this, and it was ready for me.
    (not in the talk, but…)
    After I continued on to graduate school at Arizona State University, I met John on a highway outside of Santa Fe. I was on a research road trip, and he had taken his son to a music competition. It was not until recalling this on a visit to University of Delaware in 2011, that he told me how his son had won the scholarship at that event to Berklee Music school, and gone on be a session musician, eventually touring as the the bassist for Duran Duran! John said that it was Wes’s birthday, and I passed on a greetings. That’s where John had to pause and let me know that Wes tragically passed away the year before at only 33 from thyroid cancer. See Geology Like The Wolf

    Geology is a subject where part of the learning is in a classroom, but the real education happens out in the field.
    Allan Thompson (everyone called him “Doc”) was a huge influence on my choice to go to graduate school. He taught many practical and life lessons in class, often leaving the syllabus for some commentary on climate or the environment. he was a folk tale teller. . He was the one who uttered in class once that in fields like Geology where we have many classification schemes, “Some people are lumpers and some are splitters” — I have used that many times in other contexts.
    His love for geology and passion came through out in the field Doc was popular for his personality and humor, but it was his care and concern that all of us felt. he led the 6 week field course where we drove out to the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Big Tetons in Wyoming to put our education to work. It was where I saw the big western sky and knew my future was in the west. He was a teacher on this trip yes, but much more.
    I would dare say he loved his students, he loved teaching. It was obvious. We felt it.

    I did go on to graduate school in Geology at Arizona State University. As a graduate student at ASU, a relatively small department that had a high profile because of their success at getting research grants, you go to know your professors (and they you) in and out of class. It was first name basis, it was a softball team and volleyball, it as again shared times in the labs and in the fields.
    I could mention nunmerous professors, but I owe much life wisdom to what I learned from my advisor Susan Kieffer, who had come to ASU after I finished my masters. She was a rockstar in Geology, having done a wide range of high profile research projects with the US geological Survey. She took me on as a PhD student.
    Sue had a fresh way of approaching problems, but really stressed the importance of writing (she got me being aware of the use of active over passive voice) and promoting the role of science as being a communicator to the public. I also learned of how hard it was for her to had achieve so much in Geology against a lot of adversity in a male dominated discipline.
    But more than that, when I reached a point midway in a PhD program where I knew I could not continue, she supported my 10000% when I told her I wanted to go into education (see The Day I Cried in a Canyon). This photo was taken about 4 years ago when I visited her at her new home on Bainbridge Island in Washington State.

    I have just tried to share key memories of 16 years of my education. I wanted to put that in perspective. How much would it take to store in a computer’s memory everything that happened in that time span?
    This is a crude estimate, but there are people who have been lifelogging storing all the data of their lives (e.g. Gordon Bell) who capture with wearable device video, audio, image, and other data.
    From a research paper LifeLogging: Personal Big Data (Cathal Gurrin. Insight Centre for Data Analytics) the data storage for this would be approximately 35 TB per year. For 16 years, this works out to be 560 Terrabytes of data, or would require 120,000 DVDs to store it. That red box is 120 DVS, so I would need a shelf with 1000 rows for all that data.
    My stories I shared would easily fit on one DVD. Or actually it would be just a short reel of extras added to the bonus features.
    The data amount is small. But the impact, after some 40+ years for some of the memories? Huge.

    What do we do with this? What is the ACT? It’s not about lists of tricks or using technology. You can probably guess the secret sauce that applies to the parts of school I find memorable and was missing in the parts not memorable. I cannot offer a series of Twenty Five Tips To Become a Memorable Teacher.
    Forgot this non-essential line
    I think of the old cowboy Curly in the movie City Slickers. Holding up one finger, he asks them if they know the secret of life. It’s one thing. “You stick to that and the rest don’t mean ______.” But what is that one thing, they ask. “That’s what you have to find out”

    Just last week I was talking about my presentation with Amy Collier and she mentioned an old paper by “someone named Pederson” about a “Miss A” that seemed relevant.
    With a bit of google I found much more than relevant. The paper:

    Pedersen, E., Faucher, T. A., & Eaton, W. W. (1978). A new perspective on the effects of first-grade teachers on children’s subsequent adult status. Harvard
    Educational Review, 48(1), 1-31.

    is incredible. They studied a poorly performing school in a low socio-economic part of a major north eastern US city, trying to find out what the impact was long term of first grade teachers. Students who started at this elementary school had a very low, like 5% eventual graduation rate from high school. Ironically, the lead author was one of these students.
    But there were 3 long term first grade teachers they called “Miss A”, “Miss B”, and “Miss C”. They started first looking at changes in IQ from the 3rd to 6th grade for these students, but later saw that this was not the best measure of impact. So they located them as adults, and surveyed them using a scale of Life success” via employment status, size of house, family members, etc.
    There was no preferential loading of students for these teachers, but what they found was students from Miss B, and Miss C ended up with no increase or even a decrease of IQ, and a later standing in adult life of middle or low success. But the ones who had Miss A showed a statistical increase in academic and life success. By the time they did the study, Miss A was in last stages of a terminal illness, so they had to rely on her old students to describe what she did.
    She set a bar of expectation for her students, she expected them all to read by the time they finished first grade. She would spend extra time with them, pick out books, give the ones who lacked lunch money her own lunch, all the caring things that a dedicated teacher does.
    The most telling thing to ,e was they would ask the adults if they could remember which teacher they had in first grade. More than half of the students of Miss B and Miss C could not remember, but 100% of Miss A’s students could recall her name. And even more amazing — 4 students out of the 100 surveyed identified Miss A as their teacher when the school records proved them wrong.
    More not in the talk
    I am totally gobsmacked by the scope of this paper, and its methodology (the little I know about it). The authors cite the issues with sample size, but they way they dealt with all of the research elements is impressive. Plus that this was published more than 35 years ago.
    The thing that dismays me is that a paper this old (1978) is STILL LOCKED NEHIND A PAYWALL. Why does Harvard, who has more money than Princeton and God, need to keep research locked up?
    so this is how the copyright circumvention system works. I asked someone who works at a campus to download and email me a copy. We broke the law. Fuck the law, it”s stupid.
    I found the first mention and a worthy summary The Amazing Miss A And Why We Should Care About Her from a talk by Carnegie Foundation’s Daniel Fallon. With some more searching I came across a Dec 20 1973 letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette by Eigel Pederson (the paper’s lead author) “Miss Apple Daisy’s pupils- an extraordinary measure of success” where we learn more about Miss A, whose real name was Iole Appugliese – she had her students call her Miss Apple Daisy because her Greek name was hard for them to pronounce.
    Lastly, what even takes the story more over the top, was again, Pederson’s own story- he was a student himself at this school, though not of Miss A. He did not graduate, but went on to a crafts job, later finishing hs schooling, going on to off all places HARVARD, later teaching at the school he went to, and rising on to be a Provost at McGill University.
    This paper is going to be a whole blog post in itself, and seems ripe for some riffing in a Federated Wiki. Later. Back to the talk, but thanks again Amy Collier for turning me on to this paper.

    As a teacher, what do you want to be remembered for? For being a MOOC super professor who taught (but never communicated with) one hundred thousand students? For covering content? As helping students achieve a list of competencies?

    It’s not always about devoting hours of attention to each student. Designer and writer Frank Chimero talks about a memorable advisor/mentor who gave him 3 powerful words as a review on his work. This was his mentor, who was on the phone while thumbing through Frank’s portfolio. The mentor, paused the conversation and said these words to Frank “Needs more love” — and it made a huge impact on him. Not everything needs to me done with the intensity of Miss A- if you know your students you can offer powerful feedback in small morsels.
    How often do we think of love in our work? Is this thing a robot tutor would ever say?
    See Chimero’s Lesson

    “Needs more love.” Best damn advice I’ve ever gotten. You can keep your practicality and your action items and your take-aways. You can have your instructional advice, your recipes, your prescribed steps to fulfillment, and your ladder-climbing. I’ve got this: this little gem of insight from a man who taught me so much. The only thing that matters is that we care more than we already do about the people and places and projects that we give our time and attention. We’ve got to believe in the stuff.
    And, you know? I can forget everything else I ever learned from him and just keep this. I can lose my portfolio, I can lose my clients, my motivation for the work; I can lose my bluster, my attitude, my point of view, my aesthetic. I can lose a million dollars and every client I’ve ever had or could ever hope to get. I can quit design, I can never speak of typography again, I can never put words to another page. I can lose my memory, I can lose myself. All of it can disappear in the next second, and it won’t matter.
    I’ve got this. “Needs more love.”

    Another huge influence on this mode of teaching is Michael Wesh, Anthropology professor at Kansas State University. He teaches large lecture courses in a way where students are highly active. He teaches in a model that focuses on what the student needs, not about “covering content”. In his recent videos and blog posts at http://myteachingnotebook.com you can hear what he learned from his infant child, doing hand stands in class, taking his students out to lunch not to talk about the course, but to learn more about them, and mainly teaching as a soulful act.

    But here is the twist- being memorable is not about your ego on being memorable. All of the examples I shared are based on rather small actions that were not meant to be “memorable”. It just turned out that way. And lest you think I am talking about popularity, the whole goal is not whether you are memorable or not… When I told my friend Kevin about this a few weeks ago he remarked that we should “be humbled by the fact we may never know what’s memorable.”
    Nearly all of my teachers I talked about have no idea these things were memorable… to me. That’s why I only have photos of two of them, who I got a chance to tell them much later.
    So if you are trying to be memorable, you are going about this wrong.

    I want to close with a story about Danny, a student in one of my digital storytelling courses. He always sat in the back, with a hoodie on, and his face mostly hidden behind his laptop. I knew from his blog he had some interest in playing drums, and I made some passing mention of asking who his favorite one was (John Bonham). But from my position at the front of the room, I did not think Danny was tuned in.
    My perception was wrong.
    At the end of the class, my students make appointments to meet me to review their semester’s work. I ask them what grade they think they deserve and why (nearly 90% of the time the report the same grade I have in mind). But Danny blew me away with the amount of concepts he got from the course, that I would have never known about from my assumptions based on what I thought I saw.
    And during the last weeks of the class, while that laptop was up, he was actually recording me in class- I played a part in his video story as “the boring professor”.
    I have no idea if me or my course was memorable to Danny. I will likely never know My experience with him was memorable to me. But what matters is that I do what ever I can to understand whats important to my students, what they care about, and aim to provide the best experience that might hopefully be memorable to them.
    That’s maybe 80% accurate for what was in the talk. I frankly cannot remember. My method is to be very clear on my opening lines and where I want to go in the end, but often I go a bit off my script (which there is none) in the act of talking. You might have to wait to see the video.
    I felt very energized doing this, and despite the bright lights in my face, I could feel the energy coming back at me. All I could tell for sure is that I think as I was talking I was so excited I may have been spitting at the front of the stage (I hope that is not on camera).
    The practice on Thursday as really helpful, I almost never fully talk through my presentations before, I do it all in my head. I found my timing was 2 minutes fast, so I knew I could add detail.
    I was watching the clock closely, and was pleased to find myself on the last slide with two minutes left, and able to end with about 10 seconds to spare.
    In my prep I reviewed Bryan Alexander’s great set of posts on presenting, especially on the attention to voice. I did more deliberate breathing, and use of the extended arms.
    So there you go, I’ve done the TEDx thing. You want see the logo appear on my site or my twitter profile, it was just another talk.

    Last speaker @cogdog live at #TEDxUSagradoCorazón +/- Memorable pic.twitter.com/WeH75Mvl5L
    — Antonio Vantaggiato (@avunque) October 16, 2015

    But I think it was a good one. Thanks Antonio for making this possible, Tu sei il più grande!
    flickr photo shared by cogdogblog under a Creative Commons ( BY ) licenseTop / Featured Image Credit: tweeted by @hetsorg — no one seems to ask but twitter images are never associated with a license. WTF?

  46. At least one article is from March 2015, so it shouldn’t be terribly out of date. But, surprisingly, some of products are not available any more and some sites of startups are already down.

  50. Documenting our lives is by no means a new past time, with journaling a centuries old practice. In the 21st century, however, that practice has taken on a whole new meaning. We have countless apps, gadgets, and services at our disposal – not only making it easier to document every waking minute, but automating that process as well.
    Why You Should Consider Lifelogging
    One of the most basic reasons to consider documenting your life in 2016 is to keep track of your health. Many of the apps and services that make lifelogging easier than ever are made to keep tabs on your activities, your heart rate, and calories burned, among other things. Not only can you use this data for a better understanding of your state of health, it can also be a form of motivation.
    Fitness and health aside, there are more creative ways to document your life – with photos, video, writing, and scrapbooking . Again with all of these methods, you can choose an online or digital service or you can keep it old school with a pen and paper. At the end of the year, you’ll have a keepsake, of one kind or another, filled with memories you might otherwise forget.

    When using any online or automated services, it is always worth remembering that you are putting a great deal of your life in the hands of third party developers. This comes with obvious risks – you could lose that information, or worse yet, it could be hacked. When choosing your services, always keep these risks in mind, and consider what kind of information you are comfortable sharing with the world publicly, or even privately with a company that will have access to your personal data.
    Once you’ve weighed the pros and cons, you may be interested in a few of the services or gadgets listed below.
    Photo & Video
    Photos: Documenting your life in photographs is certainly nothing new. Project 365 is a great way to commit to taking at least one photo a day. To encourage yourself, and decrease barriers that might make it more challenging, nothing could be easier than taking those photos with your mobile phone. As the saying goes, the best camera is the one that’s with you.

    So where to store all these photos? If you want to share them with others, Instagram is one of the easiest, most obvious options. For more options, check out our list of sites and apps for lifelogging with photos.
    And while the selfie may be one of the most looked down upon affectations of the Internet era, taking a selfie a day and creating a timelapse video with the images can be an amazing way to document your physical changes over the year. As the video below shows, doing it for even longer can yield fascinating results, and even promote awareness at the same time:
    [embedded content]
    Video: GoPro is probably one of the best known video lifelogging gadgets out there but is more often used in outdoor activities. An entry level GoPro will set you back about $199, and you’ll also have to purchase a mount or harness to go with it.
    Automated Photo & Video: If you want a more subtle gadget to constantly capture your surroundings, the Narrative Clip (formerly known as Memeto), is a small camera you can clip to anything, or hang around your neck, and it will automatically shoot photo and video as you go about your day. A new version of the Narrative is available for preorder and offers users 8 megapixel photos, 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and can store up to 4,000 photos or 80 minutes of video. The camera can also shoot photo and video simultaneously.
    [embedded content]
    Snippets: For more control of the video you capture, the mobile app 1 Second Everyday, available on iOS and Android, lets you choose video and splice it down to just one second of your day. It might not sound like much, but you’d be surprised how much you can capture in that short span of time. And when you put it all together, it offers an amazing snapshot of your life.
    [embedded content]
    The Written Word
    Web, Mobile & Desktop: If the written word your preferred method of documenting your life, one of the best all encompassing services is Evernote. With Evernote, which as we’ve noted can help you develop your creative ideas, you can organize your writing in notebooks, can save your writing from the web, desktop, or mobile app, and best of all, you can use Evernote to take photos of your scribbles and save them all in one centralized location. The text in these snapshots is also fully searchable, and the latest update of the iOS app makes it easier than ever to capture your notes, with automagic detection. If you’re worried about securing your notes on your mobile device, don’t forget that Evernote offers an encryption feature.

    There are of course other options available like OneNote, which MakeUseOf’s Justin Pot prefers over Evernote, as well as FetchNotes (check out our review), or SimpleNote. You will, however, want to be selective as to which service you choose for reliability’s sake.
    If you prefer to share your writing with the world, you could always opt for a blogging platform like Tumblr or WordPress.
    Analog: Of course, it goes without saying that you could also opt for an analog option where you write everything down in a journal or notebook.

    If you want to get really creative with your journaling, you could try your hand at scrapbooking. While even scrapbooking has been digitized, there’s still something to be said for the messiness of the real thing. With scrapbooking, you can meld several different methods – writing, photography, and art to create a visual representation of your life.
    Audio
    If you find yourself in situations where you can record your voice rather than jot things down, you could always document the things you want to remember using just your phone. With apps like AudioCopy for iOS or Tape-a-Talk for Android, it couldn’t be easier to record audio snippets to preserve a moment from your life on a daily basis.
    Fitness
    Activity Trackers: If one of your New Years resolutions was to get healthy, a great source of motivation is wearable technology that can keep track of your activity. There’s no limit to the options out there with Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and the Nike Fuel Band, to name a few. Even the Apple Watch, as we point out, has many of the features found in popular activity trackers. If you’re interested in delving even deeper into your health, the Tinke, which costs just over $100 on Amazon, says it can measure your heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation, and heart rate.

    There are also manual options out there if you want more control over input of data, in which case you can use a service like TrackThisForMe, available for Android users. iOS users can give Reporter a try for a more unique experience. The $3.99 app will prompt you to respond to a series of questions, like who you’re with, where you are, and more. As it gathers data, it is able to create visualizations of your habits.
    Sleep: In addition to tracking your actual activity, you can also keep track of your quietest time of day – when you’re asleep. With free apps like SleepBot, available for both iOS and Android, you can find out more about just how restful (or restless as the case may be) your sleep is. The free app tracks your sleep cycle offering information such as the pattern of your sleep quality over time.
    Diet: If you want to keep track of what you’re consuming, free apps like MyFitnessPal, available for iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile allows you to track your caloric intake. Of course, with apps like this, there are no automated options, so you’ll have to manually log the information. If you really want to keep an accurate record of every calories, down to the gram, you could try an app/kitchen scale combo like the SITU, which is only available on Amazon UK at the moment, but can be delivered elsewhere if purchased through the official website.
    Put it all in one place
    If you want to put all of this information in one place, it will be a bit of a challenge, but there are some apps that strive to make that task a little easier. Saga, available as an iOS or Android app, will connect to a wide range of services from Instagram to Fitbit, and makes it easy to share the data with your friends, if you so choose.
    A comprehensive list of lifelogging apps, gadgets, and services can be found here.
    Are you going to document your life in 2016? What apps or services would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments.
    Image Credit: Antonio Zugaldi, Dafne Cholet, Barry Silver, Newsbie Pix
    This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.
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  52. I’m looking for an easier way of awarding and tracking brownie points, with several snowflakes…
    A few years ago I started giving out “AndyPoints” to friends as a recurring joke. Over time, these points have become an informal way of recognizing anything and everything awesome, inspiring or otherwise good made by my friends and acquaintances.
    Fortunately, this has fostered a healthy competition for points across several circles of friends, but in order to maintain competitiveness I must be able to award and track points with a minimum of hassle, and this is where I need your help.
    Right now the setup is something like this:
    1. Alice does something worthy of AndyPoints
    2. I send a tweet with a specific hashtag awarding AP and stating a brief reason for it (“+10 AP for @Alice for sharing an awesome article…“)
    3. The IFTTT robot picks up the tweet and adds a new row to the private AndyPoints spreadsheet on Google Drive with a verbatim copy of the tweet
    4. Once in a blue moon I actually update the Public AndyPoints spreadsheet by manually adding the totals and the data in the private spreadsheet.
    5. Delete used rows in the spreadsheet and announce via social media that the rankings have been updated
    There are many drawbacks to this method, the worst being, IMO, the fact that (a) I have to put up some kind of personal information out there for non-twitter friends so I can recognize their names in the rankings (“+5 AP for Bob for…“); (b) I have to manually update the totals, which introduces an extra step where mistakes can happen, and (c) AP awarding can’t be seen in real time, which hinders competition
    Is there any way to make this better? I need an automated way of awarding and tracking AP. Bonus points for:
    a) Being as unobtrusive as possible (as easy and quick as sending a tweet)
    b) Ability to be used from an Android phone/app (I don’t trust my memory enough to award points when I get back home)
    c) Ability to publish rankings in or near real time
    d) Free-as-in-beer
    Also, I’ve looked on the internet and the closest I’ve come to a solution is this list and Daytum, but still have some of the drawbacks of the current system.

    Tagged:general

  53. Living life with a chronic illness that needs regular attention can be stressful. Traditionally, patients relied on the ‘pen-and-paper’ method to keep track of their medicine schedules and doctor appointments. But small slipups could have drastic consequences. This is where modern day technology, the likes of Cooey, can swoop in and save the day.
    Cooey is an end-to-end health monitoring app leveraging IoT for chronic health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and weight management. As a ‘health vault,’ it can capture health vitals, medicine list and lab reports. Based on the data collected through the app and smart devices, it helps analyse and provide insights of vital signs for patients and doctors.  Cooey has so far clocked over 75,000 downloads, with about 60 percent of its users coming from India, while the rest are spread out over Middle East, USA and UK.
    Cooey teamStory so far
    Cooey was started in June 2015 by Manu Madhusudanan and Prabhakaran T.P.  after they had firsthand experience of what many chronic patients go through in India.  At one point, Manuel daughter caught pneumonia and he also noticed that his mother, who has high blood pressure, would note down her vitals on paper. As the healthcare sector requires highly accurate data, Manu and Prabhakaran felt that the whole process needed to be digitised, starting from the patients. So they tried to conceptualise a solution for the recurring needs of patients.
    After market research and speaking to doctors and patients, the duo launched Cooey as a third platform- engaging patients on the health management system and providing targeted services to them. Manu said,

    Till now, health IT includes Hospital Information System (HIS) and other products/apps but there is still a missing last-mile link, i.e., engagement with patient.

    Cooey consists of a six-member team and the startup is currently bootstrapped, but looking to raise an external funding round in the near future. Currently, the app is free to download and use, but the company is earning revenue through sales of its blood pressure monitor and smart body analyser, available on e-commerce platforms. Once it reaches a certain user base, Cooey plans to explore other monetisation channels, such as monthly subscriptions for users or a freemium model with premium features.
    Currently, Cooey is looking to partner with more online pharmacies, home care services and labs to give a better experience and more choice for its users. Talking about their future plans, Manu said,

    There are lot of possibilities to introduce IoT in healthcare in a non-intrusive manner to better monitor vital signs and provide doctors with accurate historical data. We are exploring other IoT devices like smart glucometers, vests and toothbrushes.

    How it works
    Users need to sign up on Cooey and enter their basic details and the ailments they would like to monitor. Cooey then gives the users a detailed overview of the different features of the app and how to use it. One of the key features of the app is to maintain a ‘health timeline’ where users can add notes and remind themselves about their health. Users can also upload medical records as PDFs or images to maintain a digitised personal health record.
    1. Measure and monitor: Users can either enter that data manually or rely on smart devices like Bluetooth-enabled BP monitors or smart body analysers that auto log the medical data. This can be shared with the doctor or loved ones.
    2. Chat-based query and order: Through Cooey, users can get their health-related queries answered over chat and also place orders from nearby pharmacies. For older users or those not very comfortable typing, the app allows voice-based commands through their personal assistant, ‘Maya’.
    3. Engage: The data collection from the device, recurring medicines and lab reports are used to create a dynamic profile of the patient according to their current health condition. This analysis can be used for providing personalised insurance services.
    4. Hyperlocal targeting: Cooey also enables health service providers to send targeted offers to customers based on their location. This helps local service providers increase their conversions rates. This is another revenue source for Cooey to leverage.
    Sector overview
    The entire healthcare market in India is estimated to be worth around $80 billion and a large portion of it is offline. Having a digital record of healthcare data makes it easier for doctors and patients to understand patient histories in case of emergencies. There is currently a lot of interest in IoT and the benefits of ‘quantified self’ and ‘life logging’ with digital glucometers and wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple watches. India is estimated to have about 130 million hypertensive and 75 million diabetic patients, and hence there is a big need for disruption in this space.
    Healthcare is seeing a lot of interest from both entrepreneurs and VC communities. ‘Consultation on demand’ platform DocsApp raised $1.2 million led by Rebright Partners. Lybrate, which had raised a $10.2-million Series A round from Tiger, Nexus and Ratan Tata in 2015, also offers consultations over chat and video. Then there are many startups in the medicine commerce space like- Myra medicines, Med-x and even Tencent-backed Practo.
    What we liked
    Cooey is well-designed and makes the process of tracking vital health signs simple and quick. The health timeline feature is useful and provides users with a bird’s eye view of their health. The remote tracking feature too is an add-on to help children keep track of their parent’s health (or vice-versa), irrespective of location.
    The ability to track upto three vital signs (BP, blood sugar, weight) in a single app either manually or through smart devices enhances the appeal of the app. Cooey also provides an engaging experience with mini quizzes and relevant information through blogs in the app.
    What could be improved
    With a four-minute introduction video in the beginning and a variety of features, the learning curve can be steep for non-tech savvy users. While Cooey has included voice-activated commands, this feature is still in beta and didn’t always produce accurate results.
    The app currently has three major tabs-Home, History and Offers, while some of the other important features require a lot of scrolling. So, including more tabs or sub tabs for easier and quicker navigation would be helpful.
    YourStory take
    Cooey is a well-thought-out and executed app that can help diabetics, blood pressure and obese patients regularly monitor their health and take immediate action in case of emergencies. With a variety of revenue models to tap into, Cooey has interesting value propositions for a variety of parties in the healthcare space. It will be interesting to see how they go about further expanding their services and offerings and make the lives of patients easier.
    Check out their website and download Cooey here
    What do you think about this app, do let us know in the comments below. Also do check out other apps under our App Fridays series.
    Originally Posted On Your Story

  56. Loggr is no longer available (nooo!!!). I am trying to find an alternative. Loggr had a really clean interface and a simple export to excel option that was handy for data enthusiasts like myself. Being able to customize quantitative data seems difficult to find in apps. Most do a “success or fail” approach which is sometimes good, but I like to track numbers such as number of cups of coffee, sleep hours etc. I know many web programs can do this, but the a key point is being able to update quickly during the day which is why a mobile app is important.

    Thanks for the extensive list, I’ll try to find my loggr-alternative.

  59. Today I read about lifelogging which is where people attempt to learn more about themselves through tracking personal info and finding correlations within the data they collect. I predict that the Quantified Self movement will grow with the internet of things (IoT) adding new technology that collects new information. With easy to use AI such as TensorFlow, these technologies may also be able to start forming correlations and making decisions from personal information without the need of human intervention.
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