Logging my life using Moves (and how I got there)
Until quite recently, I was using a FitBit - the Ultra - to monitor my daily movements. I’m not entirely sure why; there’s just something I find comforting about this whole idea of life-logging.
I am a big fan of keeping a regular diary. But it goes beyond that. If I can supplement my own sporadic ramblings with data to back it up, it just somehow makes me a little happier inside.
This element of the logging of my life began with a pedometer.
This pedometer:
For a year, believe it or not, I wore a pedometer. Everywhere. Every day. Even if I spent a day at home in my pajamas (I was studying for my degree at the time).
And it really was a year. From January 1st to December 31st. 2010.
The pedometer gave me some basic information, like the number of steps I’d taken (duh), the approximate distance travelled based on my stride length, and the approximate number of calories burned, based on my height and weight.
Each day, I would almost religiously enter this data into a Google Docs spreadsheet. And I would occasionally um and ah at trends or blips.
But then I never did anything with the spreadsheet. It’s still there, somewhere, in the cloud. But I’ve never done anything with it.
I never even made a graph out of it.
Fast forward to 2012, and Amazon was having one of those fire sales they occasionally have, and I picked up a bargainous FitBit Ultra.
It looks like this:
A beautiful piece of industrial design, if a little plasticky, my new gadget recorded the same stuff the pedometer had done, and some other stuff too. And instead of me having to manually enter the data on to a spreadsheet, the little device uploaded it for me, wirelessly.
And I never did anything with the data. I occasionally looked at the website and had an um and an ah about it. It even made little graphs out of my raw data. But I never really did anything about it.
And then one night I was reaching across to my bedside table to get my Kindle. I lifted it, forgetting my FitBit was on top (it’s virtually lighter than air, you see), and in the swinging process, it plopped straight into the pint glass full of water sat next to it.
Rather miraculously, the damn thing still worked - still works, even - but the battery took the brunt of the water damage. It barely lasts a day now, and one of the selling points of the FitBit for me was that it could go more than a week without needing to be sat on its charging station.
And even if I hadn’t dropped my FitBit into a glass of water that night, one of the other negatives to having a separate piece of hardware for such things is remembering to wear it.
Ironically, my introduction to FitBits was a piece by Craig Mod about the traumatising experiencing of forgetting to wear his FitBit one day.
The other negative about the FitBit - at least for me - was the useless data it produced when I rode my bike. It doesn’t know I’m riding my bike, so it just records ‘steps’. Not ideal.
So anyway, one day I stopped wearing my FitBit. And now it sits in a kind of gadget graveyard somewhere near my computer.
And then I read about a free new iPhone app called Moves. It lives on my iPhone’s main homescreen now.
The theory goes like this: you already carry your iPhone everywhere. Your iPhone already has a bunch of sensors inside it, whose primary purpose is making your pocket telephone seem indistinguishable from magic (or something). Those sensors can already record stuff like position, movement, activity and so on. And, if asked to by an app, they can do so constantly.
So, Moves does so. Constantly.
You open Moves for the first time and then it just runs in the background. It determines your position (i.e. on earth), it measures the number of steps you take (i.e. by wiggling around in your pocket), and it determines your movements (i.e. from one place to another). You give names to those places you visit most often, like ‘work’ or ‘home’, or you tag them with locations from the Foursquare database.
A typical journey looks like this (if a typical journey for you is driving from the made-up town of Denshanger to a supermarket in Buckingham, for example):
But more than just logging movements and journeys, it determines how you got from A to B.
Walking. Cycling. In a vehicle.
And then it plots all that data on a map. With paths to show the routes you took. Hotspots to show the places you spent significant lengths of time. And data to reflect your daily movements.
A typical day’s “timeline” looks like this:
And then it just keeps recording this data. Every day. Every week.Every month.
The pink blobs represent running. I don’t run much.
And it makes that data look all simple and pretty, like all data produced in 2013 must.
Best of all, the elements you see in the screenshots above are tappable.
They wobble. Or bounce. And then they reveal something else. If you tap the round bubbles, they toggle between steps, distance and time.
The lines on the maps tell you the mode of transport used. Tapping the mode, or the start and end points, enables you to edit the details of those points.
The information screens are all slidable from side to side. Or swooshable, perhaps.
And so on.
And that’s basically it. And I love it. It’s so easy.
I will probably never do anything with the data. But it’s reassuring to know it’s there. To know thatI can look it up when I want.
The one major trade-off, depending on how you live your life and use your phone, is that all this constant data-logging really saps your battery.
I use my phone rather heavily as it is, so my battery doesn’t last more than about 12 hours when I am also running Moves in the background.
But I’m rarely away from a plug socket for more than 12 hours, so I can’t say it’s really inconvenienced me too badly. And if you know you’ll need your phone to last as long as it normally does, you can tell Moves to have a nap - until next charge, for an hour, for three hours, or indefinitely.
Moves is a free app for iPhone, downloadable on the App Store. I hear they’re working on an Android app. They have a nice website here (including wobbling bubbles for you to click). They can be contacted via Twitter, amongst other places: @movesapp. They seem like nice guys.
