Introducing Quantime
Or: On the current state of the quantified self
An abridged version of this post is available on the App Store download page. Thanks.
A few years ago, I decided it was time to affiliate myself with a group of people whose shared peculiarity is suffering the constant inundation of questions like:
“Why are you scanning the barcodes on your food?”
“Do you really take your cell phone with you to the gym?”
“Have you considered that maybe you wouldn’t need to keep your phone attached to the wall if you’d just stop using Moves?”
“Is that a graduated cylinder next to your toilet?”
It’s called the Quantified Self and chances are you’ve heard of it. The Quantified Self (QS from this point) carries as its slogan “self knowledge through numbers.” As explained more eloquently by Eugene and Mark at the QS Resource Guide:
“More precisely, it is the process of extracting personal meaning from personal data.”
So what’s personal meaning? Let’s define personal data first. Your personal data is the raw data that’s being collected, like your weight, or how many miles you’ve run, or your mood, or your blood glucose or the book you’re reading. It’s the tedious part—the part where you try to find your notebook or the index cards you’ve been making tally marks on and write down what you wanted to log, hopefully without interrupting what you were doing too much.
Personal meaning is the second part—it’s when you take that raw data and try to derive insights from it. This is why the QS movement is important—without insights, you’re just going through the motions of collecting data to create nothing but noise. For example, what effect has running had on my blood glucose, and how has my weight been affected because of it? Is it perhaps linked to the reason I’m feeling sluggish? Can it help me alleviate the symptoms of my chronic pain? This part is more difficult than tedious—up first is the Sisyphean task of exporting your data to CSV, followed by loading it into Excel, and fiddling around with a pivot table until you give up. And if you do manage to get something out of it, you’re left to start all over after you’ve added more data.
So who tracks? When people learn of my tracking habits, the usual response amounts to “Oh, so you’re like, OCD or something, huh?” The fact is, it’s not just the navel-gazing, the neurotic and the nerdy that track meticulously. Professional athletes will hone on a single data point until they’ve optimized it perfectly. No one is suggesting that level of dedication to the art, however, some people will track to help in areas of their life they feel need focus.
And tracking just works. A Pew report from last month reported that:
“Eighty percent of adults living with two or more [chronic] conditions do so, compared with 70% of those living with one condition and 61% of those who report no chronic conditions.”
Another report dated January 2013 states:
“Seven in ten (69%) U.S. adults track a health indicator for themselves or a loved one…50% of trackers record their notes in some organized way, such as on paper or using technology, and 49% of trackers do so only in their heads.”
That seems unacceptable to me. Are we really at a point where—in 2014—34 percent of people believe that it’s easier to log manually on paper and deal with the stress of the analysis (or lack thereof) later, rather than immediately using a computer that lives in their pocket? The thing is, I was with them. But now, I’m hoping Quantime is—maybe not yet a fix—but at least a step in the right direction.
Delivering on the promise of the subtitle
Although I provided the subtitle On the current state of the quantified self, I do not presume to be an expert on the subject. I was able to attend the first meeting of the Indianapolis branch of the QS this past summer—unfortunately, my schedule has not permitted it since. I’ve never been to a QS conference. However, I think it’s clear to most that the movement is so fragmented even Android developers would be astonished.
Take tracking body weight, a simple metric that both influences and is influenced by other factors. Currently, if you use a Withings to track your weight, you’ll have your data in a nice place on the Withings site. But then, if you’d like to see how your exercise and diet have impacted your weight, you need to link Withings to RunKeeper. And to MyFitnessPal. And Fitbit. And maybe link them all back to Withings. Then you need to decide if you’re using MyFitnessPal or Fitbit or Withings itself to track calories based on best data portability. Then, if you can even find a way to show all three (or more) variables at once, how can you be sure your data is safe? That it won’t be subject to an API closing or a limit placed on your information?
Two problems have been identified thus far:
- Current tools are too limited in data structure and too complex in data collection for daily consumer use.
- The current landscape is too fragmented for efficient and effective analysis, and there is no guarantee your data will remain intact.
Since the problems are now neatly delineated, what can we do about them? We can introduce Quantime. An app that lets you track anything and a place where your data is free and open for you to do with what you please.
Welcome to Quantime
The last all-in-one tracker you’ll need.
Problem number one is what I am attempting to address with today’s release. Available now in the Apple app store for iPhone, Quantime is a flexible personal tracker with an emphasis on versatility and ease of data entry.
Although I could go into detail concerning the current release, honestly, I hope the app speaks for itself. Give it a shot and come back. Remember, it’s the first version—I’ll discuss included features and design decisions in a bit.
For now, I’d like to discuss the future.
Is the quantified self really a big deal?
I’m a second-year medical student. I may not know much medicine yet, but I do know that some patients seem to have trouble with “misremembering” their history. I’ve had a patient tell me he has been having headaches—rated at an severity of 8/10— for two weeks when I interviewed him, then tell the third year student I presented to that “it’s been closer two years” prior to informing the attending physician that it actually started ten years ago. All of us were aware of the patient’s changing story—it’s not an uncommon thing to have happen, but neither is it unavoidable.
I wanted to hand him an iPod Touch and a Bluetooth blood pressure cuff and tell him to take them home and record as often as he can remember. I wanted him to be sure track his headaches, and his stress, and his coffee habits, and his salt intake, and everything else that I couldn’t make accurate decisions about in a fifteen minute appointment. But I couldn’t just prescribe him an app. Not yet at least.
Now, how does the view look from 10,000 feet?
I imagine, in this same scenario, I would be able to do exactly what I wished I could. I would send the gentleman home with directions on data to collect, set up his patient account with my physician account, then register to receive notifications if his blood pressure reads higher than 160 mmHg systolic or 100 mmHg diastolic. Then, in two weeks, I again see the patient but this time with his deluge of data—isolating any malignant episodes and checking against headaches, stress, caffeine and salt occurring within two hours of the isolated event. The software helps me pinpoint correlated data while checking for significance—not only against the patient’s history but against every person that has ever tracked the same thing—then allows me to provide the patient with a personal, practicable plan. Finally—with his permission—I take into account his genomics, proteomics and microbiome to be sure everything is customized just for him.
I walk out of the appointment and my Google Glass informs me that since Quantime is crunching both my water intake and urine output, it can guess that I’m probably dehydrated and need 2.4 ounces of water. I take a sip from my Bluetooth water bottle, Glass registers the update, and I get ready to see my next patient.
Let’s bring it back down to sea level. Better diagnosis for physicians and reminders for when you’re thirsty available in a couple of decades is all super exciting, but you’re probably wondering, “Kareem, how does all of this affect me right now?”
The immediate effects of using Quantime are two-fold:
- Become more mindful of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it—awareness is key to improving any aspect of your life.
- Start recording data for the future—it serves both to allow for more context for your own insights as well as helps seed a public, anonymous store of data used across users and to be made available to academic researchers.
If you haven’t done so already, click here to download Quantime and start tracking something. Anything. Maybe track how many spreadsheets you finish at work today. Or how many free throws you made on the basketball court. Or how many days it’s been since your last cigarette. How many steps your infant daughter is taking as she learns to walk—how many times she falls down and giggles. How many more pounds until you’ve lost the weight you’ve promised yourself (and your family, and your doctor) you’d lose.
Just start tracking. Consider this an investment in your future. And your family’s future. And maybe even society’s future, if all goes well.
And if you do, maybe you’ll discover if how many spreadsheets you finish has an effect on your sleep. Find out that you’ve taken your free throw percentage from 65 to 75 percent, or that your lungs have been clear for a month. And watch your daughter walk and run and drive and become an adult because you’ve lost forty pounds and are healthier than ever.
In sum, here are my goals for Quantime:
- To enable people to track the things that matter to them, the way they want to.
- To provide people with a safe, open place for the consolidation of all of their personal data, whether tracked manually or through an external application or device.
- To enable people to use their personal data to make meaningful, actionable decisions.
We’ve got number one down. As for numbers 2 and 3—we’re not quite there yet. But we could be, with a bit of help.
What kind of help?
The next step involves the creation of a server for sync of recorded data from the Quantime app to the centralized store. Next (or concurrently), is the development of an API that allows for data to be saved to Quantime from external sources. Those two things are my responsibility.
What I’m asking of you is to download the app and use it how you like. Let me know if something is broken, and let me know if there’s something you think I’m doing correctly. You can use the Submitted a bug tracker for either, or contact me through Twitter or email.
If you’re a application developer, I have a special favor to ask of you. Think about where in your applications a user could benefit from recording personal information. Perhaps a Twitter client can keep track of my tweets, mentions and messages. An integration with GitHub could let me log my commits and compare against a Pomodoro tracker to quantify my productivity. A Chrome plugin that will track what I watch on Netflix. A reader for Pocket or Feedly articles that will determine my reading speed and provide me with insights on what I read, how I read it, and how it is affecting my life in the grand scheme. Think of Quantime as Mixpanel for your life—what important data points would you set up an event for?
If you’re a user of an application or device that could use integration with Quantime, let the developers know why and how you’d like them to liberate your data. Imagine not only exploring your data from an activity tracker, but from Automatic, or Nest, or Lockitron. The possibilities for analysis and insights are endless.
It’s time to stop leaving your data locked and subject to the generosity of companies who refuse to acknowledge your complete ownership. Let Fitbit and Jawbone and Nike+ know that you love their products, but that they should stop competing by limiting data access and aligning themselves in exclusive partnerships. And now even LG, Sony and Garmin are making their own activity trackers—presumably with their own data silos. What’s so interesting about another device that does nothing new and only serves to lock your data in a proprietary store? We should have the freedom to choose the devices and applications we prefer, without worrying if data consolidation is difficult—or even possible. Let competition be about innovation for consumers, not data restriction. The M7 chip in the iPhone 5S has basically leveled the playing field when it comes to standard activity tracking—we need new, better ideas.
If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you sticking through my pleonastic tendencies. I hope this has helped you consider the larger dynamics of the Quantified Self movement, specifically where Quantime fits into it all. I’d just like to provide a final reminder that the QS movement is not about health or fitness—it’s about any type of personal data, data from which you can extract a personal meaning. So pick something that’s uniquely meaningful to you and make a tracker for it. Leave Quantime on your home screen for a week and use it when you find yourself reaching for pen and paper. You just might love it.
Let’s make 2014 the year of the Quantified Self, together.
Kareem · @kalbaba
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