When I was last in the US I bought a iBGStar blood glucose monitor to try out. For those of you not familiar with the device it is the first personal blood glucose tester to be integrated into the iPhone. It only works on the iPhone due to the iPhone’s proprietary  connector (which has changed now since the iPhone 5 where you’ll need a converter  for it to work) but for the population that has the iPhone this offers a highly compact device that has mobile diagnostic capabilities as well as the ability to send the structured data out of the device and into your own data environment.

My experience with the device since then has been largely positive. It has good build quality, is easy to use, the software is adequate for my needs, and the ability to move the data off the device is good (although one could imagine better). Getting the data off the device is a big deal for me so I can’t say I give it top marks but I don’t think there is a glucose device yet that would get these ratings. The process is:

• Take the test
• Results automatically uploaded into iBGStar software on the iPhone
• You click on the “share” link and it produces an email which presents the information to a human in a nice way, it also attaches a CSV file for ingestion into your data analysis environment

Ideally what I’d prefer is that you can specify a service that manages your personal data and the readings are then automatically posted to that service and incorporated. Seems like a small gripe based on where the market is right now but in a few years I think this will be the norm and the added convenience will be a strong consideration by consumers looking at purchasing a new device. Ahh well my requirements and the majority of users requirements remain divided and being disappointed when you live on the “bleeding edge” (pun intended) becomes the norm. For most people I can happily report that this device feels like good value for money, it does what it’s intended to do, and it does it with a little panache that has historically not been a part of the glucose testing marketplace.

One other piece of bad news though must be mentioned in any review … the market this device serves right now is largely the US. In the UK, where I reside, you can not buy the device not to mention the test strips or lancets for the device. I’m sure they’re working on this and on their website you can sign up to be told when your country will be made available.

For those interested in a few more details, here are the reporting screens that you get “on board” the iPhone software. Bear in mind that I haven’t used the device enough recently to get a nice visual of in the first diagram:

It should also be noted that I don’t have diabetes nor am I pre-diabetic but rather I was interested in getting to know more about my glucose levels through measurement and secondarily I wanted to see how easily this kind of device could be brought into an individuals self-tracking regime (more likely for diabetics than non-diabetics such as myself). I would love to hear from anyone who is diabetic and therefore has the experience of using traditional glucose testing equipment.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

• Adriana Lukas – An roundup of the annual QS conference in Palo Alto
• Jules Goldberg – Talking about his newly released Snore Labs application for snorers interested in reforming their bad habit
• Stuart Calimport – Talking about his personal experiment with memonics
• Ryota Kanai – Talked about his experiments with brain imaging and how his brain compares to others
• Matt Dobson – Shared his knowledge about the quantification of emotions including his ideas on what developments might take place over the next

If you’re interested in being alerted to new videos when they become available you can do that by simply subscribing to the “channel” which can be found here:

https://vimeo.com/channels/londonqs

 Hope you enjoy these sessions as much as I did.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

I recently got my hands on the soon to be released FitBit Zip. For those of you unfamiliar with this device, you can find out more here:

http://fitbit.com/zip

But in summary it is:

• A lower cost line of FitBit’s Accelermeters
• It doesn’t have a backlit display or an altimeter like it’s older cousin
• But it does beat the Ultra in a number of key areas too:
  • It uses Bluetooth 4.0 which means you can sync with your phone rather than needing the base station that comes with the Ultra!
  • Battery life is massively increased (due in part to Bluetooth 4); i have heard rumors that it can last 3-6 months on a single charge!
  • The design is meant to be more resistant to breakage which the Ultra could sometimes be faulted with on it’s hinge joint.

My experiences with this new device are based on initial observations of the past two days where I’ve worn both the Zip and the Ultra side-by-side.

The Good

Like previous FitBit devices this device is easy to setup and you will be up and running (figuratively) in no time. If you travel or find yourself wanting your dashboard to be updated more intraday then the bluetooth syncing with the phone is a HUGE win. The increased battery life is something I can’t speak to first hand as I’ve not needed any charging yet but I guess the exponentially longer charge times would be a plus although in my mind this is not a huge deal. The key is to make sure you are alerted and done with enough time left to allow charging your device without interfering with your normal routine. In matter of fact, I think the better feature here would be fast charging rather than longer battery life but I can’t imagine anyone complaining about longer battery life so I let’s keep it in the “good” section.

The Bad

The display on this device is not nearly as nice as the Ultra. I miss the back lighting frequently and even in normal outdoor conditions I generally prefer the look of the Ultra’s display. That said, the Zip’s display is completely functional and it’s not a major downside. If you’d never had the Ultra you’d probably be just fine with it. What I would say is the larger negative is the touch sensitivity of the display. On the Ultra there is a physical button that you press to move between screens but on the Zip navigation is performed by touching the screen and in my experience this is a bit cluegy. I may end up getting to the point where my screen clicks are more consistently navigating to the next screen but as a beginner you often hit the screen and get zero change which can be quite a frustrating experience. Finally, the lack of an altimeter I guess must be considered a negative but for me it didn’t really matter. This sensor is not critical for how I use the FitBit and from talking to other users I’d guess this is true for the majority of users out there.

Measurements

So I guess the most important thing I should focus on is … does it work and does it work consistently with the Ultra? The basic answer is “yes” it works but interestingly after comparing the results of the two devices side-by-side for two days they are not exactly the same. They’re not a million miles apart but the general trend seems to be that during more sedentary periods the Zip is slightly more stingy in recording “steps” yet slightly more generous during periods of activity. I believe I heard somewhere — although please don’t quote me on this — that the new calculations are meant to be more accurate but that some users didn’t appreciate the change (even it brought them closer to the “truth”).

Conclusions

I’m still enjoying trying this new device out and since I’m on the road at the moment the phone syncing feature is brilliant. There are some drawbacks to this device versus the Ultra but it’s also a less expensive product. If you want the best of both worlds then the yet to be released “Fitbit One” may be the best choice. I will likely get that when it becomes available but until then I’ll stick with the One and see how a little more use makes me feel about this new accelerometer.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

So let’s say you’re interested in tracking your activity levels but at the same time you fear technology. Devices like FitBit or Nike’s FuelBand might work for other people but you’re not ready to offend your local chapter of the Luddite community and start using this alien technology.

Well finally there’s good news. Now you too can track your activity effortlessly but with a device that will never need batteries and scoffs at having an LED display. Introducing the new Urwek UR-210. This mechanical wonder is “all natural” and finely crafted so your friends at the Luddite club will undoubtedly nod approvingly while secretly harboring great jealousy.

Not to the matter of price. Unlike the FitBit’s convenient $99 price tag, this little mechanical wonder will cost you a upwards of 100 grand. That’s a lot but how can you pass on a device that’s so cleverly met all your luddite dreams. If you’re still interested you can read more here:

Watch reminds you to stop being lazy  |  A blog to read

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

I recently purchased a personal oximeter so I can better understand how this type of device might be used in a home setting. After a little browsing around and a pointer from a colleague in the London Quantified Self group I chose the Crucial Medical Systems CMS 50E. This device is available from Amazon (although it’s listed under the brand of “Contec”) at a reasonable price (£62 / $90). It should be noted that for these sensors there is a fairly large range in pricing; the CMS 50E is in the lower-middle of the range but it is on the low end of the range for units where you can actually get the data out of the device and onto your computer (a pre-requisite for it being interesting to me).

Why did I buy this device? Well there was no driving medical reason why I needed it but rather it was mainly educational. I wanted to both understand what the products in this space looked like and learn how blood oxidation monitoring can be used. Whether or not it will be something I keep up I’m not at all convinced but I do expect to learn a lot from having tried. In this post I’ll share my initial observations on the device and I hope to follow this up in a few weeks time with some more thoughts once I’ve really had a chance to use it and learn from the process.

The CMS 50E

First Impressions

The CMS 50E is a small device (the pictures often make it look misleadingly large) and clips itself over your finger. It’s grip on your finger is strong enough that one can sleep through the night without fear of it falling off but not too tight to be uncomfortable. Having slept with it twice now I can say it’s completely functional way of recording your oxygen levels; it feels a bit awkward at first but I imagine after a few more times it will become less noticeable. Anyway, being a relatively “good sleeper” I had zero issues with falling to sleep when using this unit. The display on this unit is well done, colours are sharp and information is displayed in a reasonably straight forward and attractive manner. Clipping it onto your finger and watching the device come alive with information is fun and dare I say probably a worthy party trick for the QS-inclined. Purely unintentionally, I brought it home to a house full of guests and before I knew it everyone — children included — wanted to try it.

So, as far as first impressions go, all is well. Now it comes to actually reading the manual. I know a lot of the men in the audience will feel that that is a wholely unnecessary step reserved for those too weak to figure it out themselves. Well I can understand that mindset and yet hopefully you will believe me that trying to “just figure it out” has its limitations with this product when you get past the surface use cases. So now that we’ve got around our initial male bravado, let’s come back to the manual. It’s terrible. This is the worst case of “chinglish” I’ve seen in a long time. So yes, in a few cases I laughed but it was still quite hard to gain a real understanding of the product through it. Looking online you will be reassured to find that a lot of the chatter around the product is positive. People more qualified than myself seem to concur that the readings are very accurate. Some joke that while the manual is terrible it’s all relatively easy to figure out yourself. Really? Maybe I’ve just fallen down and hit my head and that’s why it’s so difficult. Actually, I suspect that people who are using the device for real-time monitoring find that use case very easy. It’s when you start to want to download it to your computer and analyse it that it becomes less clear.

Computer Analysis

First off, the software that comes with this is only for the PC. I use a Mac and run windows in VMWare and that works too but there is no native Mac application. Of note, there is an open source effort called SleepyHead that reads in the Contec files (it also reads in files from ResMed S9′s). Looks interesting and I have downloaded it but not used it yet. Another annoyance — that likely won’t matter to many of you — is the software is provided on one of those “mini-CD” formats that is half the height of a normal CD. As this doesn’t work on my iMac drive I had to find the software on the Internet which wasn’t a real problem. For those of you who are interested, you can find it here: [software download]. For people on Windows 7 onward you should be using V2.x of the “Sp02 Assistant”. In the V1.x software there were two programs, one called Assistant, one called Review. I’m currently unsure if the 1.x Review software is useful additional functionality but have concentrated my initial focus on just the v2.x Assistant.

The first thing you notice (see below) is the software is a blocky old school user interface design. Reminiscent of the the VB and Powerbuilder days; definitely not in the running for a “sexy application” design award.

Sex appeal aside, does it work well? Is it usable? Well in my experience it is not very intuitive at first and my experience was compounded by two annoyances:

1. Wired Connection. The primary way this device connects is via a mini-USB connection but it’s not a standard cable and plugging in just any micro-USB will not work. You need to use the one that comes with the device. I guess I can live with that but I’m constantly in the pursuit of less cables in my already complicated life and so this kind of annoys me. Also for the road warrior it means one more cable to carry around with you (personally my warrior days are over). As another minor annoyance, it seems that even after you’ve connected once, you’ll need to go through the manual step of connecting each time you want to run the software. It’s not that it’s hard, it just seems unnecessary.
2. Bluetooth Connection. I really shouldn’t complain here but I’m a complainer. The 50E isn’t advertised as even having bluetooth — there’s a more expensive model that does — but newer units of the device (including mine) have it thrown in for free. I guess maybe it’s a case of “you get what you pay for” but my manual has no mention of bluetooth yet my computer and 50E see each other just fine but there is a password needed to pair the devices and my ability to guess the password has met with the same success as my patience in trying to mount a brute force attack. If anyone knows what the password is I will gladly owe you beer of your choosing.

Once you get the hang of it though, there’s not too much to it and I think it does meet the right “functionally fit” bar. Being a bit of a winger I must make a few more complaints though before I conclude:

• User Profiles. There is a concept of “user profiles” which associates your Sp02 data with some reference data (name, age, gender, weight, etc.). I thought initially that this was quite easy to setup but now my data comes back from the device not associated with the profile I’ve setup. This is probably something I can figure out but seems like it’s less user friendly than it could be.
• Time. There isn’t a clock built into the device and therefore when you start “recording” you need to specify what time it is. I know it’s petty but if Amazon’s “one-click” purchase means anything than things like this must be consider anathema in user design. Yes a clock would have cost additional money … probably about a $1. Let me suggest that that would have been a $1 well spent.

As a final note I’ve included an example report from my sleep last night. Turns out I’m a rather dull sleeper but you should get a sense for what kind of information you’ll be getting in the analysis software. The software presents four reports but the results they produce overlap considerably from report to report.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

Back Story

My interest in fat (or more specifically the removal of fat from my body) started out being measured simply by weight. I wasn’t obese but I had enough extra pounds to lose that weight was a “good enough” measure for body fat (its directionality not a specific number). To top up my knowledge I was using the Withings Body Fat scale which quickly and simply allowed me to gather and tracking weight and body fat. I knew the critics complained about the accuracy of body fat measurements through an electrical resistance based sensor (as is employed by the WIthings scale) but it’s simplicity and my lack of dependance on precise results made it entirely acceptable for the timeframe. This year I realised that all the “easy pounds” were gone and while I could probably still use weight as a crude proxy to body fat it was becoming less effective to measure my success/failure at losing body fat.  Enter stage two … the Calliper era.

Body Fat Measurement with Callipers

The only true and absolute way to measure body fat during an autopsy after your dead and to many people that’s not an attractive trade-off to achieve this level of precision. The second most precise method (I believe) is through water displacement and while you can do that the facilities required are quite costly and hard to come by (at least in the UK). That leaves the “calliper” as the gold standard amongst those who are interested in continuing life and living within practical boundary conditions.

Great. So why aren’t we all using these simple devices? They’re small, they’re not that expensive (although good ones are). Yet almost no one I know has measured themselves with Calipers and according to Sports Fitness Advisors that’s a good thing. It’s good because these are precise measurements where .1mm makes a difference and if you don’t measure in precisely the right spots you’re getting the wrong answer.

Ok, so that means it requires skill but that’s not all that makes it difficult. In the end we’re all still just simple cave men that have traded in our caves for houses. We like information in small packages. When Withings tells me my body fat percentage is 16% that’s an easy number to remember. For many of you, if told that your body fat percentage isn’t “a number” but “many numbers” your heads will explode. Maybe not your head specifically but someone you know’s head. I’m sure there’s a scientific study somewhere that will back me up. Anyway, when a data set grows larger from a base of 1 the complexity of understanding and internalising it move up exponentially. What can we do? Can’t we just get back to that single number somehow? Well yes and no. There is clear demand for a single number that is headed up by the vocal cave man lobby and in response many formulas have been developed through the years to do just that. Six of the most common formulas are listed below (thanks to linear-software for their cool online tool … you can find it here: http://www.linear-software.com/online.html):

The cave man (or woman) inside of you is clearly pleased. All those numbers were a distraction. A facade. You don’t need them as you now have formulas that will get you back to beloved single number. These are indeed happy days but wait … there’s a rain cloud on the horizon. What happens if you put your data into these formulas? Well shock and horror … they produce different results. Wildly different in many cases! How can that be? Well the reality is the various formulas have to assume certain things that aren’t static in the general population. Variables like age, ethnicity, athletic conditioning, gender, and many others will effect the effectiveness of these various formulas. To illustrate this here’s a sample variation I found on Sport Fitness Advisor:

That’s one big standard deviation. Big enough to end the cave man party that you were planning. What do you do? Well what’s typically recommended is stop using these formulas. Start coming to terms with the “set of numbers” rather than “just a number”. Doing this will mean you’re learning more about your overall body and you no longer need to worry if you’re using the right formula because there’s no formula needed. The only problem is … it’s a lot more work and it will take a bit of time before you can look at these number and have them intrinsically mean something to you. What’s best for you is an individual choice. Personally I’m going to try and do both and see which one sticks over time.

One last note, i have been told that the Durnin and Wolmersley test is by far and away the most popular formulas in use and while popularity doesn’t always point to “better” it does immediately make it more “referenceable” which helps contextual and communicate your numbers to others.

Measuring at Home

As was already mentioned, measuring home in a meaningful way requires precision and many would suggest just having this handled by professionals. However I suspect many of you reading this are quite keen on doing it yourself anyway. I’m in this camp and although I haven’t started yet I have bought a calliper that is recommended for home use: the Accu-measure FatTrack digital calliper system. I’m looking forward to building the courage/patience to start using this somewhat regularly but would be interested in others view on this device if they’ve used it before.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

BBC News – Should I take aspirin?.

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

Last comment before I hand you over to Seth … the reference to circadian oscillators related to face recognition is unexpected and very interesting if for no other reason than I’ve never heard of it before but I definitely find that a few days of working from home with limited contact with others definitely effects my mood negatively. I had never directly associated that with seeing faces but it’s got me interested. Of course my gadget-centric thinking is also thinking that maybe what Seth is secretly hinting at is that I need a larger television so that the faces on the TV will seem lifelike enough to remove my depression risk. Ok, probably not.

Sleep and Mood Strongly Linked:

I recently came across a 2005 survey, done in Texas, that found people with poor sleep were far more likely to be depressed or anxious than people with better sleep. Huge risk ratios:

People with insomnia . . . were 9.82 and 17.35 times as likely to have clinically significant depression and anxiety [than persons without insomnia.]

Other studies have found similar results. For example, a 1979 survey interviewed the same people twice, one year apart. People who had insomnia both times were 40 times more likely to be newly diagnosed with major depression during the intervening year than those who did not have insomnia at either time.

A simple thing to say about the sleep/mood correlation is that it supports my theory of depression, which says depression is often due to malfunction of two circadian oscillators (one controlled by light, the other by faces). If they are working properly (in sync, with large amplitude) you sleep well and are in a good mood when you are awake. If they are not working properly (e.g., not in sync) then you do not sleep well and are in a bad mood at least part of the time while you are awake. What is called depression (e.g., not wanting to do anything) is actually a good thing in the middle of the night. Not wanting to do anything — being still — is necessary to fall asleep.

A sad and more complicated thing about this correlation is that it is ignored. It is not explained by any theory of depression popular among psychotherapists, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, not to mention a dozen other explanations of depression (psychoanalytic, etc.) that psychotherapists favor. Nor is it explained by any pharmacological theory of depression. In other words, if you seek treatment for depression within our healthcare system the treatment you will receive will derive from a theory that cannot explain this result. Yet the correlation is so strong it must be telling us something important.

You can read endlessly about the high cost of health care. What if the high cost is not the core problem? What if it is only a symptom of something less obvious? What if health care costs a lot because we have a poor understanding of health and disease (as the failure of popular theories of depression to explain the sleep/mood correlation suggests)? What if we have a poor understanding of health and disease because health research is too concerned with allowing healthcare providers to make money?

(Via Seth’s Blog)

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

Acousting Cough Counting Technology Issued U.S. Patent:

 

iSonea of Millersville, Maryland has announced that its cough counting technology received a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The company’s products, like the pictured Wheezometer, use Acoustic Respiratory Monitoring (ARM) to detect wheezes, rhonchi and coughs.

Read More

(Via Medgadget)

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget

Sex-starved flies ‘turn to drink’:

Scientists find that fruit fly males that have been rejected by females drink significantly more alcohol than those who successfully mate.

(Via BBC News – Health)

# posted by Ken Snyder at LifeGadget