Closing The Loop

Editor's Notes

• #2: Quantified Self is entering unchartered waters. Unchartered waters in privacy and freedom of information, as well as unchartered waters of knowledge about ourselves. How to do we navigate these tools and pick which bits of information are important, and which one’s aren’t. Brief introduction about me. Emotiv, building a brain computer interface. Gazzaley Lab – Cognitive Neuroscience on Attention and Distraction using MRI and EEG. Basis – Continuous and Connected Sensor Monitoring through a wrist watch. Now, Lir is making minimal hardware biosensors for the iPhone. - I can tell you more about that shortly.
• #3: Wearables and biosensor augmentation is in its infancy. We've come a long way from pedometer... All of these things are separate devices, with separate charging and download mechanisms. They are a bit of a pain to use all at once. and ideally in a connected world we would be gathering this data all at once.
• #4: Recently, many people bring up that they already knew what most wearables could tell them. Is there an actual value proposition left after it was so much effort to buy, charge and gather the data? Wearables are still in their infancy remember, and no one asks google maps why bother anymore? now that we've all thrown our street directories away. So after I've said all that, why are wearables interesting anyway?
• #5: To answer whether wearables have any use, you have to answer - can technology change us? We are increasingly automating the work that humans once did i.e. washing machines instead of rinsing, wringing and hanging on line. And we are losing skills i.e. navigating, orienteering as people rely on GPS. People rarely handwrite anything any more and we mostly type on keyboards. It seems we are offloading parts of our brain to computers to figure out, leaving us more time to think about other things. It always was a bit of a resource issue, with only so much time in the day, so much brain power to do so many things. If we can automate as much of the repetitive low level work as possible, more energy can go on R&D efforts to understand the world faster.
• #6: So many choices of different gizmos to pay attention to. Which one, which information is better, what goals do you want to reach? There is just too much information, yet not enough that’s truly useful. There is so much noise, and few strong streams of data that are easy to unravel. How do we focus with so many quantified self devices offering us insights into ourselves? Which ones are useful, and which ones are a distraction.
• #7: That's freedom.
• #8: The simplest way to look at human function – a black box. By no means a full explanation of what we are, but at least it’s a start! The first thing you notice is that we don’t weight things equally. Data biases based on how we communicate and our culture.
• #9: The first step to moving quantified self forward is to think of simpler body functions that we could automate further.
• #10: Up until now, there has been a lot of hype around wearables as a fashion item. Realistically, not all wearables will be sexy, because not all of health relates to sexy topics. There is a saying – trust your gut. It’s socially taboo to talk about it. Just wondering, did anyone see that episode of Scrubs where they sing a musical about poo? Doctor’s are into this stuff, so are people who are into Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine. Your stool can tell you things such as hydration levels, whether you’ve recently had a virus or been on a course of anti-biotics. Long term unhealthy trends in your stool can tell you about Irritible Bowel Syndrome or Crohn’s Disease. In short, there is a lot of information there. Also, if people are stressed, they tend to be constipated. I saw a $1million prize for measuring stress, and wonder if anyone is considering stools as an information input into this algorithm? If not, they should. Even the FDA agrees this is important information, and has a published stool scale, called the Bristol Stool Scale which ranks your stool from 1-7 based on texture. See app to the left. Toilets in Germany and Russia have a special shelves so that people can look at this information. In the US, people are afraid of this information, how can it be made acceptable to communicate without embarrassment? Hopefully these apps help uncover the ‘feast’ of health information that’s available. ----- Meeting Notes (10/6/14 16:06) ----- it = poo afraid to talk about this information
• #11: We spend a third of our lives in our bedroom. A lot of things happen to our bodies at night, that tell us about how we spent our days. Quantified Self is only just touching the outskirts of this deep topic – Sleep. A sleeplab by your bedside. What do you get out of this? Optimizing you sleep cycle? Circadian rhythms, improved memory, and perhaps more efficient sleep, so we could spend less of our lives doing it. 40 % of Americans snore regularly. That's a lot of broken night's sleep. That's a massive problem! Sense - Sense's high precision sensors are able to identify noise - in your bedroom and beyond; pick up on light disturbances; monitor temperature and humidity conditions; and see particulates in the air such as dust and pollen. Sense emits a beautiful glow showing the condition of your room either just before you go to sleep or when you wave your hand over. Stop being in the dark about the most important room of your life.
• #12: Lot's of women have problems with incontinence after giving birth, and lots of men have problems after having their prostate removed due to prostate cancer. Again, this is not a sexy topic, but how happy would you be if you didn't have to wet yourself in front of your friends? Think of how many children have trouble with potty training, and how many old people lose control of their basic movements. Very simply, we could save a lot of effort and a lot of dignity.
• #14: Techniques like mm wave radar, x-rays, are starting to see inside the body, quickly, and non-invasively. They can do this, but aren’t particularly portable or used for the purposes of betterment just yet. As an example, what if you could see calcite deposits(or kidney stones) using the existing mm wave radar systems? We are currently using them to see if anyone is carrying a gun or a knife, but what if we could use the same technology to determine whether someone has kidney stones or not? It’s already at the airport. - It should be on our cellphones. We need to make these techniques smaller. This is the next step for wearables.
• #15: - What we need, is small, cellphone enabled high power imaging sensors. ----- Meeting Notes (10/6/14 16:40) ----- high resolution imaging sensors
• #16: Summary. Start with negative opinions on what wearables are for, then explain evolution of technology and how it is shortening the feedback loops for us to learn faster. A lot of people comment on the cyborg future where we have bits of machines inside of us. I think that’ll happen more slowly than the advent of interchangeable non-invasive tools that can see inside the body. That way we don’t destroy ourselves at the same time we are trying to improve ourselves.
• #17: Imagine being able to describe what you imagine with an image, instead of words? Higher Bandwidth communication.
• #18: What if you could – sense fear? emotional arousal during a conversation? Whether the person you are talking to was relaxed or stressed? Would you respond to them differently? Would you make different decisions? Would it make that boardroom meeting any different? Would it help you buy a used car?
• #19: Because it created greater connection between all people, access to knowledge. Imagine a connected world of bodies. Much higher bandwidth. An interconnected US is bigger. One world. Ala John Lennon? Or like Star Trek? Or are we now ruled by nasty overlords? That’s your choice… The megamind
• #20: More information inputs routed better to process them. We should port all information through our most visual sense, this is often what synthaesthetics to, they see sounds, or numbers as colors, moving a low bandwidth computation into a more parallel, higher order pattern matching tool. Divide the brain into parts and then relate the parts to different computing innovations. i.e. language translators(why learn a language), maps(why remember the route?) etc… We find people who can’t use a hammer, or sew, but they know about deep neural nets… this will only continue as we abstract knowledge, and become more and more reliant on machines.
• #21: Many of the ways we interpret information are low bandwidth… Parts of our brain are optimized for parallel processing, but we don’t make the most of it. Voice is lower bandwidth than vision. A word of text, is not as complex as a song, is not as complex as the vision it could entail.
• #22: Googlemaps Google Glass Occulus Rift? Dashboard or our current status? Xrays, radiowaves, any sensor input really… Wordlens (understand any language) Are humans actually efficient in their current design? We could redesign ourselves. It is already happening.
• #23: Next time you think of Quantified Self, think of a broader spectrum of health. Some of it will be sexy, and some of it can massively accelerate our understanding of ourselves. This is a very connected effort, requiring data scientists, hardware engineers, and health experts to collaborate on a scale like never before. Happy to chat more about any of these topics.